Slavery by Another Name (48 page)

wal s to the famous apple tree, who went to the bat le elds of

Virginia and poured out their blood like water in defense of our

Southern homes."14

Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while

Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while

"good negroes" deserved the care of the courts and the a ection of

white southerners, other blacks did not. "Shiftless vagabonds" take

the money of farms and violate contracts, just as Glennie Helms had

done, Wiley said. "If they were to be protected in this sort of thing

the farmers of this country would be ruined," he concluded.

After a two-hour break to cool the courtroom, Reese returned

with the government's nal argument. Lacing his closing with

references to the Bible and a passage in Exodus denouncing those

who tra c in slaves, he scored members of the gal ery who sneered

when blacks were referred to in court as "American citizens." Reese

argued that Turner deserved no mercy. "He bought the negroes just

like one of you would buy a horse or a cow," Reese told the jury.

"Can this man come here and ask you for mercy after that?"

After 5 P.M., Judge Jones began an emotional two-hour charge to

the jury. O ering a detailed history of the peonage statute and the

laws of labor in the United States, he reviewed the evidence

presented and then explicitly urged the jurors to put aside the

appeals to Civil War loyalties and white racial al egiance o ered by

Turner's lawyers. Jones, visibly aroused, left lit le doubt as to the

verdict the jury should reach. "If you believe from al the evidence

that Turner bought this darky, took him to his place, forced him to

stay there, when he wanted to go away, and worked him as a

convict under guard to liquidate the debt paid for him, then he is

guilty," Jones said.15

Representative Wiley and Colonel Bulger shifted nervously as the

judge al but instructed the jury to convict their clients. In truth

there was also lit le doubt what would happen. Within hours of

beginning deliberations that night, word spread through the

courthouse that the jury was deadlocked—with eight men voting for

acquit al and four to convict.

Noti ed of the split the fol owing morning, an exasperated Judge

Jones cal ed the jury back into the courtroom. His con dence that

southern white men could be counted on to police themselves was

badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil

badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil

perjure yourselves in the sight of God and dishonor yourselves in

the eyes of men," Jones told the jurors. Representative Wiley rose to

object, but the judge ordered him silent and told the jurors they

would not be excused until a verdict was reached. "The court does

feel impel ed under an earnest and solemn sense of duty as to the

verdict you ought to render in this case, to appeal to your

manhood, your sense of justice, and your oaths, not to declare that a

jury in the Capital of Alabama would not enforce the law of the

United States because it happened that a negro is the victim of the

violated law and the defendant is a white man."16

When the jury resumed deliberations, the vote shifted to seven

men for conviction and ve for acquit al. But among those ve,

there was no possibility of change. On July 13, the jury reported

that they were impossibly deadlocked. Judge Jones, barely

concealing his scorn, declared a mistrial and set the Turners free.

"God forbid that the time wil ever come in this country when

you are helpless and distressed and have been the victim of

oppression when you wil be denied that protection of the law to

which you appeal and to which every law-abiding human being is

entitled among al civilized people," Jones told the jury. Reese

vowed to bring the Turners back to trial before another jury17

That would not be needed. On the fol owing Monday, Fletcher

Turner surprised Montgomery when he returned to the federal

building and took a seat with his at orney at the front of the gal ery.

When Judge Jones convened court to begin selection of jurors for

the peonage trial of Robert Franklin, one of Turner's lawyers, N. M.

Lackey, rose to speak. Turner was ready to plead guilty to a charge

of peonage in order to avoid further prosecution on any other

charges and in return for the dismissal of the counts against his son.

"My client did not realize that he was violating the law. He did not

know that he was doing anything that was not justi ed by law,"

Lackey explained. "If any cruelty was practiced it was done without

the consent of my client. In this af air my client was mistaken."18

Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true

Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true

slavery. "He purchased their liberty and services," the judge

remonstrated, as Turner stood emotionless before the bench. But

Judge Jones was no naive young Republican prosecutor. Even as he

lectured the unrepentant farmer stil driving slaves forty years after

emancipation, Jones knew hardly any jury in America, most

certainly not one in Alabama, could be relied on in 1903 to convict

the man before him. A new trial would accomplish nothing. He

accepted the plea of guilty, levied a ne of $1,000, and the case

was closed.

IX

A RIVER OF ANGER

The South Is "an armed camp."

In the three months since Reese began his slavery investigation, the

guilt of every defendant cal ed to court had in one manner or

another been established. He'd won the personal at ention and

support of the U.S. at orney general and of President Roosevelt

himself. Indeed, a new position had just been created in his o ce

to oversee an even more expansive at ack on slavery. Reese

believed history, and the power of the nation, were with him. Even

rabidly anti-black, white supremacist politicians and newspapers

such as the Montgomery Advertiser initial y reacted with

embarrassment to the peonage charges that so suddenly burst into

the public eye.

In truth, the mistrial in the case of Fletcher Turner marked an

ominous reversal. Resentment to the exposure of the new slavery

was growing. Other voices, defiant and rancorous, began to rise.

On the Saturday before Turner's surprise guilty plea, Alabama

secretary of state He in spoke to an annual reunion of Confederate

veterans in the town of Luverne, issuing a ringing endorsement of

how men such as Pace and Turner had nobly returned black

workers to their proper position as slaves and at acking Reese and

Judge Jones as wil ing to sacri ce the honor of southern whites in

return for advancement under President Roosevelt. They were nest

foulers and "nigger lovers," cried supporters of the accused. He in

and his al ies said any man who did not defy them deserved al the

contempt of the white South.

Reese and He in traded charges through the newspapers—the

U.S. at orney asserting that He in deceitful y mischaracterized the

facts of the case; He in, annealing his coarse racism in the language

of the U.S. Constitution, retorted that Judge Jones was usurping the

American ideals of trials by jury. 1

American ideals of trials by jury.

While the Turner trial was under way, a frenzied mob in

Scot sboro, Alabama, gunned down the town sheri in front of his

family as he refused to turn over a black teenager who had

al egedly "at empted criminal assault" on a nineteen-year-old white

girl. Once the sheri was dead, the black man was seized from his

cel and hanged from a telegraph pole that night.

Midway through the trial, a lawyer in Dothan, Alabama,

telegraphed Reese to report that a client, Enoch Pat erson, was

being held in peonage by the town's chief of police. Obviously, no

local system of justice was available to defend Pat erson. "I have no

redress here for his wrongs," the lawyer wrote. "I know of no way to

get justice for him but to submit the mat er to you."2 Similar

charges owed into his o ce, so numerous and substantial that

Reese—already frenzied with the duties of the trial and other

indictments—could barely manage to send acknowledgments of the

information, much less open investigations.

In Georgia, al egations surfaced in the court of Judge Emory

Speer, in the cot on-dense version of that state's Black Belt, that the

family of state representative Edward McRee, one of the most

prominent in the state, was operating a slave plantation even more

expansive and brutal than anything al eged in Tal apoosa County.

Across the nation, the spring and summer of 1903 marked a

venomous turn in relations between blacks and whites. A pal was

descending on black America, like nothing experienced since the

darkest hours of antebel um slavery. If anything, the poisoned

atmosphere and accelerating disintegration of the structure of civil

society more resembled to blacks a time two centuries earlier, when

white slave traders and their corrupted indigenous al ies descended

without explanation upon the vil ages of West Africa to plunder the

native population. For at least the next four decades, especial y on

the backcountry roads and rural rail lines of Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, no black person

living outside the explicit protection of whites could again feel ful y

secure.

secure.

The plummeting position of black Americans was driven by the

convergence of transforming currents in American life. In the years

of abolitionist fervor before and after the Civil War, northern whites

who pushed for ful citizenship for black freedmen operated under

naive assumptions. Many believed that once schools and wages

were extended to liberated slaves, they could be quickly and ful y

assimilated into U.S. society. In the span of half a generation, they

imagined the nation's eleven mil ion African Americans learning to

read and write and becoming dark-skinned versions of the yeoman

white farmers fanning across the western prairies.

Human slaves had been freed many times before—from the

Israelites, to the Romans, to Africans in the vast British Empire as

recently as 1834. But no society in human history had at empted to

instantly transform a vast and entrenched slave class into immediate

ful and equal citizenship. The cost of educating freed slaves and

their children came to seem unbearably enormous, even to their

purported friends. Their expectations of compensation radical y

altered the economics of southern agriculture. And even among the

most ardent abolitionists, few white Americans in any region were

truly prepared to accept black men and women, with their

seemingly inexplicable dialects, mannerisms, and supposedly

narrow skil s, as true social equals.

Moreover, Charles Darwin's stil new theory of evolution was

threading through American culture with unintended sinister

repercussions. Before the publication of Darwin's landmark On the

Origin of Species in 1859, virtual y al Americans viewed the

presumed higher and lower racial order of whites, blacks, and

native Indian tribes as mandated by God. But the nearly ubiquitous

acceptance of Christianity by American blacks—at the active

encouragement of whites—also clearly established the essential

humanity of slaves. Christianity said slaves—despite their legal

categorization as chat el—and their owners were indisputably

members of the same race. Regardless of the violence used by

whites against slaves, there was a loose consensus, even in the

South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and

South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and

that God demanded some measure of moral consideration and

compassion for al . Northern opposition to slavery before the Civil

War was deeply rooted in this religious precept.

But swirling concepts of evolution upended those traditions.

Dehumanizing interpretations of the racial order were unleashed—

driven and de ned not just by skin color but by ever more re ned

concepts of blood. A new conceit of multiple, distinct human

species emerged. The Indian wars of the 1870s solidi ed a growing

sense of genetical y propel ed white superiority and of raw violence

as an appropriate method of protecting white political supremacy