Slavery by Another Name (42 page)

that they are lynched in the North, or driven out like dangerous wild

beasts is no reason that our people should do the same. Let us not follow

the evil example set by those Pharisees who preach what they do not

practice and who condemn in others the deeds which they practice among

themselves. In short, let us steadfastly refuse to follow the evil examples

set by our brethren of the North and the West.38

South Carolina senator Ben Til man summed up the sentiment

more succinctly to a northern audience: "I see you are learning how

to kil and burn ‘niggers.’ That's right. Let the good work go on.

Keep it up. You are get ing some sense."39

Roosevelt had to be astonished. Only a day before Wyat 's murder

in Bel evil e, he had been in the same state, visiting Spring eld,

barely a hundred miles away, praising black soldiers and promising

his "square deal" for African Americans. At the same time, the

Justice Department was tel ing him that slaves were stil being held

down south. There was nothing the president could do about

Wyat 's death; murder was clearly outside the jurisdiction of federal

o cials. But surely slavery, of al things, was di erent. He told

At orney General Knox he was personal y concerned about the

Alabama al egations and asked for a ful report. Roosevelt was

assured that "vigorous and uncompromising prosecutions" were

under way40

In Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese was growing more troubled

by the scale of the crimes coming to light in the grand jury room.

On June 10, he sent an alarmed report to At orney General Knox.

"The conditions of the ‘black belt’ in this district are more

deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now

deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now

being revealed that hundreds of negroes are held in peonage and

involuntary servitude of the most vicious character," Reese wrote.

"Men and women are arrested on the imsiest charges …they are

brutal y whipped, worked and locked up without let or hindrance.

The tortures in icted are severe and sometimes result in total

disability or death. Some counties in this district are honey combed

with these slave trade practices."41 Worried that his report might

sound like hyperbole—and recognizing the potential y explosive

reaction to the case that was bound to soon develop local y—Reese

asked for an urgent meeting with of icials in Washington.

The stoutly bourgeois Knox, hardly two months removed from his

lavish Pit sburgh law o ces and now ensconced in the presidential

cabinet, was perplexed by Reese's let er. He had to take it seriously.

President Roosevelt had expressed concern, and the inquiry grew

from charges rst lodged by a federal judge—one of Roosevelt's

earliest appointees. Reverberations were stil rippling across the

country from the president's "square deal" speech less than a week

earlier.

But Knox couldn't avoid a measure of incredulity. How could so

dramatic a state of a airs come to pass, without chal enge, in

twentieth-century America, even in uncivilized reaches so far from

his rare ed world? Moreover, the prosecutor in Montgomery was

entirely unknown to Knox, who knew that among the scores of U.S.

at orneys named in provincial centers around the nation, many

were less-than-extraordinary political operators— holding their

positions purely as patronage to local presidential al ies or financial

backers. Two days later, on the last workday of the week, Knox told

an aide to telegraph Reese for a more complete report on the

details of the investigation. For the moment, he ignored Reese's

request for a personal audience.

The telegraph from Washington arrived at the drafty o ces of the

U.S. at orney above the Montgomery post o ce as Friday's work

hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other

hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other

lawyers who assisted him in government cases, Julius Sternfeld and

James K. Judkins, and the o ce secretary—his cousin Mildred

Elmore. Sit ing near the transomed door to the hal way, she

managed his correspondence and appointments and at ended to the

two modern luxuries of the o ce—a single Remington typewriter

and one telephone.42

Reese knew he faced the most consequential mat er of the ve

years since his rst appointment to o ce. In the balance of the

report requested by the at orney general hung al of the family

prestige and political support—perhaps even al of the aspirations

of eventual Republican power in his state—that had been so

dramatical y re ected in the ood of supportive let ers that paved

the way for his selection by President McKinley.

The heavy humid heat of early summer in Alabama was already

seeping into the hal ways of the post o ce building. Fixed at his

desk that afternoon, he perspired as the temperature approached

90 degrees, sunlight shafting through the wide sash of rippled glass

in his window. Past the arched doorways opening from the dark

interior of the federal building onto crowded Dexter Street, Reese

could have seen and heard the noisy throngs of pedestrians

crowding the cobblestone street on either side of the clanging

electric trol ey line running through the heart of Montgomery. Lines

of carriages and horsemen pushed slowly through the crowd. Open

wagons pul ed by mules driven by muddy black teamsters waited to

cross from side streets lit ered with manure and the debris of

commerce.

Four blocks to the east, just beyond the eld of view from Reese's

window perch, the domed Alabama state capitol peered regal y

across a city that had become, more than any other, a royal capital

of the New South— col ecting the tribute of both the region's

reengineered cot on empire and its smoke-belching new industrial

expansion.

The trol ey line ran in an asymmetric loop the length of Dexter

Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain

Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain

in Court Square across from the Exchange Hotel. Here, buyers from

textile makers and cot on exporters encamped from hundreds and

thousands of miles away to bid and contract for delivery six months

later of mil ions of dol ars’ worth of cot on from plants only just

beginning to peek from the deep black soil of the South's richest

cot on region.

If Reese climbed into the ve-story-high tower rising atop the

post o ce, he could have fol owed the line as it threaded through

the crowds, drays, buckboards, and early automobiles chugging

down Commerce Street toward Union Station. The streetcars

crossed Bibb, Coosa, and Tal-lapoosa streets, as they rol ed past the

long row of cot on warehouses that, by early fal , would be packed

with the bulk of southern Alabama's economic output. The cot on

compress on the same street packed bil ions of pounds of lint into

ve-hundred-pound bales ready to be loaded on railcars or the

perpetual line of steamboats waiting a few hundred yards beyond,

at the edge of the Alabama River. On the docks there, scores of

black men stacked cot on bales atop loads of pig iron taken in

Birmingham the day before from the furnaces of Sloss-She eld and

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Montgomery luxuriated in the wealth of this surge of cot on—stil

unmolested by the scourge of the bol weevil and other new insects

and diseases that would ravage the crop beginning in a lit le more

than a decade— and the rich new windfal pouring into the state

capital from the sale of convicts into the coal and ore mines in

Birmingham.

Cot on, steel, and timber were by far the state's largest sources of

wealth and livelihood. Alabama produced more than 1.1 mil ion

bales of the white lint in 1900—surpassing the pre-Civil War output

for the rst time and almost tripling the state's production during

the rst years fol owing the war.43 Vast tracts of forest were under

the saw. Yet mineral production and the iron and steel industry

surpassed al other economic activity. In 1905, the state's mines,

anchored by the slave camps near Birmingham, generated nearly

twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore

twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore

— making Alabama one of the foremost producers of iron, steel,

and coal in the world.

Early in the testimony before the grand jury in May of 1903,

Warren Reese shared the conventional assumption that the stories of

John Pace's abuses in Tal apoosa County were anachronistic relics—

isolated redneck antics, certain to be the subject of scorn once

exposed. But by the beginning of June, Reese realized how

signi cantly the new slavery underpinned Alabama's cot on, timber,

and steel paradise. He knew he was on the verge of an at ack on its

heart. He could not know how the ght would end, or whether he

would survive it.

At noon on June 10, the grand jury led into the courtroom to

report seventeen additional indictments. Then, foreman Judah T.

Moses, a wealthy sel er of real estate and insurance, gave Judge

Jones a writ en request for advice on the constitutionality of the

Alabama statute making it a crime for a worker to break a farm

labor contract—which was punishable by a ne of up to $50 or six

months of hard labor.

In the note, the jury asked whether the act violated the Thirteenth

and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution. Judge Jones

replied that he had devoted "much thought" to this question and

would give them an answer later. One juror also inquired whether

a justice of the peace who gave a sentence in excess of his authority

was guilty of peonage. The judge said that the justice of the peace

would not be guilty if the sentence had simply been an honest

mistake, but that if the o cial "acted in bad faith or corruptly" he

would be guilty of causing the person to be held in peonage. No

judicial proceedings, regardless of how lawful they appear on their

face, would be a defense, the judge noted, if they were "a cloak or a

fraud to cover up the il egal design to cause persons to be held in

peonage."44

Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

the grand jury, answering their inquiries and directing how they

should interpret the federal peonage statute as their deliberations

continued. Jones began with a long discourse on the origins of the

peonage statute after the acquisition of New Mexico by the United

States, and then laid out how the new labor system of Alabama

appeared to violate that law.

Jones explained that any man who induces a laborer to sign a

contract agreeing to be held under guard and unable to leave until a

debt is paid was guilty of peonage. A citizen or law enforcement

o cer who tricked a laborer into believing he could avoid criminal

prosecution or a sentence to hard labor only by signing such a

contract was guilty of peonage, the judge explained. Anyone who

falsely accused a person of a crime in order to compel him or her

to sign such a contract or conspired to obtain the labor of a worker

through such false charges, Jones wrote, was guilty of violating the

pre-emancipation slave kidnapping act, which forbade "carrying

away any other person, with the intent that such other person be

sold into involuntary servitude."

Jones also declared Alabama's labor contract law—which bound

hundreds of thousands of black workers to white landowners—

unconstitutional. Any person held against his wil under this statute,

Jones ruled, should be released on habeas corpus—the ancient legal

principle used to win the release of the falsely imprisoned.45

Southern whites immediately recognized the implications of the

ruling, and the reaction was furious. "Judge Jones’ …opinion, if

sustained by the highest court, is far reaching and with disastrous

consequences to the labor system of the South," wrote the Prat vil e

Progress, a newspaper in the heart of a slave-riddled county. "There

must be a revolution in the labor system."46

The residents of counties across eastern Alabama were ba ed by

Judge Jones's interpretation of the law. Tens of thousands of black

workers were at labor in Alabama under contracts signed when a