Slavery by Another Name (52 page)

telegraph wires, al the newspapers, al the money, and nearly al

the land."

When his labor contract final y expired after a decade, the laborer

was told he was free to leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his

accumulated debt at the plantation commissary of $165. Unable to

do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

work on the farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict. He

and several others were moved from their crude cabin into the

lthy stockades. The men slept each night in the same clothes they

wore in the elds, on rot ing mat resses infested with pests. Many

were chained to their beds. Food was crude and minimal.

Punishment for the disobedient was to be strapped onto a log lying

on their backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank

of wood. When the slave was freed, if he could not return to work

on his blistered feet, he was strapped to the log again, this time

facedown, and lashed with a leather whip. Women prisoners were

held across a barrel and whipped on their bare bot oms.9

As the Alabama peonage prosecutions were get ing under way in

Montgomery, newspapers in Georgia published accusations of

extreme cruelty at Kinderlou. Embarrassed by the publicity, state

prison o cials withdrew their convicts stil held on the McRee

farm. The assistant U.S. at orney in Macon asked the Department of

Justice to send him the detective who had cracked the case against

John Pace. Agent Henry Dickey arrived by train and began

inquiring how Kinderlou plantation came to hold dozens of African

Americans against their wil . He soon discovered that the McRees

had arrangements with sheri s and other o cers in at least six

Georgia counties to seize blacks and sel them into labor—al

outside the regular processes of the criminal courts. When the

McRees learned a federal investigation was under way, they hastily

freed al of the remaining workers being held involuntarily on

Kinderlou. At least forty fled immediately10

James Robinson, the fourteen-year-old boy whose sister, Carrie

Kinsey had writ en President Roosevelt begging for his intercession

after James was captured and sold, was likely one of those al owed

to ee in the summer of 1903. Kinderlou was the farm where

Robinson was being held "in chanes" when Kinsey wrote the White

House, though o cials at the Department of Justice never

connected that her plea related to a farm then under investigation

by their agents.11

by their agents.

In November 1903, a grand jury handed up a sweeping

indictment against Edward McRee and his two brothers. The men

were charged with thirteen speci c counts of holding African

American men and women. Several of those enslaved had never

been charged or tried in any fashion. Several public o cials were

indicted for conspiring to buy and sel blacks arrested on trivial or

fabricated charges in nearby Ware County and then turning them

over to the McRees.

A day later, Edward McRee and his brothers appeared in a

Savannah courtroom. McRee assured Judge Speer that while his

family had held many African Americans in the four decades since

slavery's abolition, they never intended to enslave anyone or break

the law. "Though we are probably technical y guilty we did not

know it," McRee told the court. "This custom has been [in] existence

ever since the war…. We never knew that we were doing anything

wrong."

He insisted that no black workers were ever beaten or brutalized

—in part because no worker had ever refused to perform their

assigned duties. Hounds were never used to track runaways because

no one had ever wished to leave, he claimed.12

Whatever had happened at Kinderlou, Judge Speer was of like

mind with his counterpart in Montgomery. He was certain that

symbolic punishments like the ones he handed down to smal er-

scale farmers earlier that summer—designed to demonstrate the

il egality of slavery but not in ame the anger of local whites—were

the best remedy. The McRees were al owed to plead guilty and

accept a token fine of $1,000.

Sheri Thomas J. McClel an and another man who helped in the

capture and sale of African Americans to Kinderlou fought the

charges against them, arguing as the Turners had in Alabama that

no law speci cal y made slavery a federal crime. A member of the

U.S. Congress submit ed a legal brief in support of their arguments.

Prominent state o cials sat at the defendants’ table during a

hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators

hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators

of lumber camps—where thousands of other men were being held

under similarly dubious circumstances—watched the proceedings

closely. After reviewing the arguments, Judge Speer cited the words

of U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Mil er in the Slaughter-House

Cases, a landmark decision in 1873 establishing the distinction

between federal and state civil rights. "Undoubtedly, while negro

slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which passed the

13th Article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or

hereafter."13

Speer overruled the defendants’ chal enges to the case. But once

again, in return for a guilty plea, the judge agreed to impose a

symbolic ne of $500. In the end, the only person jailed in

connection with nearly a half century of post-Civil War slavery on

the McRee plantation was a black man named George P. Hart. For

his role in sel ing a teenage girl to Frank McRee for $25, Hart spent

thirty days in jail.14

Back in Alabama, Warren Reese urged the Roosevelt administration

to mount an even more vigorous at ack on slaveholders. His o ce

reported to At orney General Knox in November that Julius

Sternfeld, the special assistant U.S. at orney assigned to the slavery

investigations, was pursuing more than forty cases in Co ee,

Geneva, Covington, Barbour, Dale, Pike, Houston, and Crenshaw

counties—al in the heavily black plantation areas of southern

Alabama. "The conditions in some of these counties are deplorable,

negroes are taken out at night time, stripped and whipped in a

most endish manner until the blood comes from them," Sternfeld

wrote to Washington. "Negro farm hands and mil workers have

been unmerciful y whipped, two negro churches destroyed by re,

the house of one negro being shot into and a negro woman's house

was riddled with shot, and while eeing with her baby in her arms

she and the baby were shot."

He vowed to ful l "the desire of President Roosevelt and the

Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary

Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary

servitude …and the real emancipation of hundreds of poor, helpless

creatures."15

Complaints of slavery streamed continual y into the Department

of Justice o ces in Washington, into the White House, and into

federal law enforcement o ces across Alabama and the South. Most

were al egations made by the rare quietly outraged at orney or local

Republican-appointed postmaster who, as representatives of the

party of Lincoln, stil felt some lingering political obligation to

African Americans or stil harbored hopes that blacks could again

become critical voters for the GOP. The rare rsthand accounts of

blacks held in slavery, many of them plaintive pleas furtively

scratched out in nearly indecipherable hands, were themselves

testaments to the ut er isolation and economic desperation of

mil ions of rural blacks.

In November 1903, Rev. L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist

church in Morganton, North Carolina, a verdant smal town in the

rol ing foothil s of the Appalachian Mountains, was on the verge of

despair. Farmer sent a dolorous let er to the Department of Justice.

His daughter had been stolen by white men and was being held in

slavery on a farm in Georgia.

"i have a lit le girl that has been kidnapped from me …and i cant

get her out," Farmer wrote. "i want ask you is it law for people to

whip (col) people and keep them and not al ow them to leave

without a pass."16

Farmer had exhausted every remedy available to a black man

trapped in the isolation of the turn-of-the-century American South.

He had contacted local authorities about his daughter's abduction,

even going so far as to at empt to serve on her captors a writ of

habeas corpus. Al his ef orts were ignored.

"The people in Ga wont do any thing with him and if the negroes

tel any thing they wil beat them to death and they are afraid to

testi e against" the man holding his daughter and many others,

Farmer wrote. If any African Americans did talk of what was

happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to

happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to

death," he wrote. "some of them has beened kil ed trying to get

away from their and i got a lit le girl there," Farmer implored. A

postscript on the back of his let er was a tel ing indication of the

desperation and shat ered con dence he shared with mil ions of

blacks. Farmer pleaded for a swift answer from the government. He

enclosed a stamp for the return answer.

On November 20, after the let er's arrival at the new headquarters

of the Department of Justice, an aide to the at orney general

assigned a le number to Farmer's let er, 3098-1902. The fol owing

day, a terse, typewrit en response was mailed on behalf of the

at orney general. It concisely acknowledged receipt of the let er and

then issued a directive to Rev. Farmer:

If you wish this Department to take any action to have your daughter

released, and the guilty parties prosecuted, you should furnish me with the

names of the parties holding your daughter in bondage, the particular

place, and the names of witnesses by whom the facts can be proved.

Respectfully,

Attorney General

No reply from Farmer to the at orney general was led. No

further action was recorded by the Department of Justice.17

The tone of communications between o cials in Washington and

federal prosecutors around the South was beginning to drift.

Investigators and U.S. at orneys such as Reese believed that as they

uncovered more and more instances of ongoing slavery and

reported these horrors back to Washington, top federal o cials

would grow proportional y more alarmed— al ocating more

urgency and resources to defeat them. In fact, President Roosevelt

and his administration were growing weary of what increasingly

appeared to be a moral crusade without a clearly at ainable

resolution—a quagmire of unintended consequences. At rst

imperceptibly, then more clearly, as the al egations of slavery grew

more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in

more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in

equal proportions.

The violence of the white South grew yet more indignant. In

December 1903, as federal agents prowled adjoining areas of the

Alabama countryside, a backwater town in Wilcox County, cal ed

Pine Apple, was the scene of a singularly remarkable episode of

racial carnage.

Deep in Alabama's Black Belt region, Pine Apple embodied the

new paradigm of the rural, post-Reconstruction cot on economy.

Situated on a critical railroad connecting to Selma and the key

Gulf Coast port of Pensacola, Florida, Pine Apple boasted a

handsome col ection of genteel homes and an impressive array of

enterprises centered on the train station and its wide-planked

loading docks. An imposing bank building was the center of

commerce for the area's landed white gentry, whose children

at ended a distinguished private school cal ed Moore Academy. Its

founder and rst principal in the 1880s, John Trotwood Moore,

went on to modest literary renown in the South. Scat ered around

the bank stood a red livery stable, a few dry goods stores with wide

windows facing the muddy streets, hitching rails tied with mules,

and a water trough served by a pump. Outside the stores, an

assortment of horse- and mule-drawn gigs, wagons, and canvas-

topped buggies stood at the wait. Near the station, warehouses, a

cot on gin, and a compress were surrounded by bales upon bales of