Slavery by Another Name (59 page)

entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful

town leaders. His thriving quarry, Keystone Lime Co., was a busy

competitor to the Turner lime quarry not far away in Calcis. Bow-

den's much larger enterprise produced 1,500 barrels of quicklime a

day, in fteen kilns. Deriving lime from the massive formations of

limestone undergirding al of Shelby County before the advent of

the steam shovel required armies of men engaged in the crudest

form of manual labor. Hardly any person would choose such work

freely. Convicts were ideal.

For a quarter of a century, Bowden bene ted handsomely from

the availability of strong black men at the Shelby County jail.

Between 1905 and 1913, he took possession of at least eighteen

people arrested in the county, after each confessed judgment in

open court—just as required by Judge Jones's order.

Nearly al of the essential local enterprises in Shelby County

enjoyed at least periodic use of entrapped African Americans.

Shelby Iron Works, the area's largest employer and biggest

commercial taxpayer, continued to acquire black men by confessing

judgment for their sentences before Judge Longshore—continuing a

nearly uninterrupted use of slaves and other forced black labor

from the early 1860s to the end of the rst decade of the twentieth

century.

Even Sherif Fulton periodical y acquired blacks through the court

for his personal use. Fulton paid nes and costs totaling $58 on a

man named John Mack in October 1907, and in return took control

of him for six months. One of his favored deputies, W. J. Finney

arrested—and then purchased—four di erent black men between

1905 and 1913.11

Later that year, Peter Minor, faced with a $126 ne for carrying a

concealed weapon, agreed to become a sharecropper for W. W.

Wal ace, the popular mayor of Columbiana and secretary of the

Democratic County Commit ee. Minor agreed to give up half of

anything he produced on land provided by the mayor.12

But the largest portion of the men arrested in Shelby County,

nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. About one hundred others

were sentenced to "hard labor for the county" and then almost

certainly transferred to the same place.

Alabama's slave system had evolved into a forced labor agricultural

and industrial enterprise unparal eled in the long history of slaves

in the United States. During 1906, the state sold nearly two

thousand black men to twenty di erent buyers. Nearly half were

bought by the two biggest mining companies, Tennessee Coal &

Iron and Sloss-She eld. The McCurdy brothers of Lowndes County

bought dozens. Hundreds more went to timber camps and sawmil

companies.

In addition to the prisoners auctioned o by the state, nearly

seventy individual local governments, like Shelby County, parceled

thousands more laborers to a hundred or more other buyers.13

These prisoners lived in such misery that even some political

gures in Alabama acknowledged the shamefulness of the system.

In a 1904 report to acting governor Russel Cunningham, the state's

top prison o cial, J. M. Carmichael, reported that Sloss-She eld

had been "required to move its prison" at the Flat Top mine to a

new location "because of the death rate at the prison formerly

occupied by them." Carmichael added that he found: "Hundreds and

hundreds of persons are taken before the inferior courts of the

country, tried and sentenced to hard labor for the county, who

would never be arrested except for the mat er of fees involved. This

is a condition inexcusable, not to say shameful."14

"The County Convict System is worse than ever," wrote Shirley

Bragg, president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, in 1906.

"The demand for labor and fees has become so great that most of

them now go to the mines where many of them are un t for such

labor, consequently it is not long before they pass from this earth…

If the state wishes to kil its convicts it should do it directly and not

indirectly"15

Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

son of a great and once slaveholding Lowndes County plantation

family—one whose property had been destroyed, according to

family lore, because of their connection to a famous Confederate

general during the same raid by Union general Wilson that also

freed the Cot ingham slaves in 1865.

Yet Bragg, a child during the Civil War, was nauseated by the

degradation he witnessed in oversight of the state penal system. "I

am more convinced that the ideas of humanity and civilization

would be bet er carried out if the torch were applied to every jail

in Alabama. It would be more humane and far bet er to stake the

prisoner out with a ring around his neck like a wild animal than to

con ne him in places that we cal jails, that are reeking with lth

and disease and alive with vermin of al kinds," Bragg continued.

He cal ed the prison mines, where at last sixty-four miners had died

of disease, accidents, or unrecorded causes in the previous two

years, "nurseries of death."16

Sloss-She eld, the successor to John Milner's horrifying Coalburg

and Newcastle mines of the 1880s, had long excel ed at the

exploitation of this county convict system. The old Coalburg mine—

scene of more than twenty years of continuous slave labor—was

nearly exhausted. To exploit the remaining coal in the area, new

managers at Sloss-She eld were building a new two-thousand-foot-

deep mine nearby, named for Flat Top Mountain, and an adjoining

complex of two hundred coke ovens. Work was hastened after a

new round of criticism when thirty-two prisoners died at Coalburg

of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other sickness in just the rst three

months of the year.17 In September 1902, the company relocated its

nearly two hundred state prisoners and nearly a thousand more

men purchased from county governments to the vast new Flat Top

mine.

But the Prat Mines complex, so long in production and now so

large and intricate that not even the owners could keep up with the

locations of al its shafts and underground tangents, outrivaled al

other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. nal y conquered inherent

chemical aws that limited the use of iron ore from its mines and

mastered production of steel at a commercial y viable cost—the first

success at rol ing steel in the South. "This great corporation has

probably done more toward the industrial development of the

South than any other agency," enthused the Birmingham Age-

Herald.18

By the mid-1890s, more than six thousand men toiled in the Prat

Mines, performing dozens of tasks—digging coal, engineering trains,

building ovens, loading and unloading cars, washing coal, charging

ovens, operating furnaces—the free workers each earning from $1

to $3 per day19About a quarter of the workers were seized through

the judicial system, including 504 at Prison No. 2 in June 1900 and

another 400 at Prison No. 1.

The number of free laborers surged past ten thousand, as the

company's thirty coal mines—including the fourteen on the

outskirts of Birmingham—generated nineteen thousand tons a day

in 1900. To provide the most critical raw materials in iron and steel

production, TCI—as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was

commonly known—operated 3,722 coke ovens and four quarries

producing one hundred railroad cars of limestone and dolomite

every day. Twenty blast furnaces smelted 3,550 tons of pig iron

each day. More than two dozen furnaces generated 830,000 tons of

iron and steel, shipped to thirty- ve states and eight foreign

countries. TCI owned in excess of 400,000 acres of mineral lands.20

W. F. Tyler, purchasing agent for TCI's prison mines and fourteen

company stores, stocked food, clothing, furniture, and tools to

supply ten thousand miners and their families—including

provisions for more than one thousand prisoners. "Quote us your

lowest price on say 3,000 yards 10 oz wool convict stripes," he

wrote to a fabric maker in Columbus, Georgia, in 1899.21 The

company issued pay in its own coinage and paper scrip,

emblazoned with the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. name

and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

1900, the enterprises col ected $2 mil ion a year in revenue.

Responding to booming demand, TCI invested heavily in its Prat

Mines complex and dozens of other sites across the seemingly

boundless coal elds surrounding Birmingham. It spent $7.4 mil ion

to open new shafts, re t old mines, and streamline equipment to

extract coal from ever deeper in the earth and speed the tasks of

sorting, cleaning, and shipping coal to market. The company's

operations teemed with more than twelve thousand miners, guards,

construction, and the endless clang, steam, and whistles of

locomotives and coal cars.

A thriving, permanent town cal ed Prat City sprang up nearby,

with a bustling commercial district, bars, brothels, streetcars,

churches, and an overwhelmingly black population. Six miles to the

west, another town, Ensley grew around the company's

mushrooming pig iron plant and six open-hearth blast furnaces,

each topped with a looming red smokestack perpetual y bil owing

with cinders and toxins. The plants created thousands of the types

of skil ed jobs that only whites could seek to obtain, and soon more

than ten thousand residents crowded into Ensley's houses and

hastily erected tenements. TCI's production of train rails and other

steel surged to more than four hundred thousand tons annual y in

the first years of the century.

Scat ered everywhere were bulging stacks of rough-cut timber and

posts used to shore up the wal s and ceilings of mine shafts. Smoke,

belching from coke ovens, train engines, and houses, never cleared.

The skies were cast with a constant gray haze. In dry weather, a

thick black residue of coal coated every at surface, windowpane,

branch, and leaf—insinuating itself under doors and into cupboards

of TCI mining camps, inescapable for an army of men and their

families. More than a dozen separate major mines near Prat City

soon produced nearly three mil ion tons of coal a year.

Where each shaft disappeared underground, enormous hoist

houses contained the elaborate mechanisms—as big as train engines

—used to lower coal cars containing miners into the shaft at the

beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

hours later l ed with coal. Past the hoist house sat the coal washer

—where each day's bituminous produce was washed and any slate

or stone accidental y added to the mix removed. Then rose the

tipples—massive timbered structures in the design of the huge

railroad bridges spanning the great gorges in the West. Trams

loaded with cleaned coal were pul ed to the end of the tipple and

the contents dumped into much larger railroad cars waiting on a

track below. From there the coal was rol ed to Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad's thousands of stone ovens— to be baked into coke.

Dozens of the beehive-shaped coke ovens sat a few hundred feet

east of the prison built at the mine cal ed Slope No. 12. Further on,

fanning out from the base of the hil was a rowdy community

surrounding Slope No. 12 and nine other coal shafts operated by

free men. Thousands of miners and their family members were

packed into shacks, tenements, and company houses nearby. A

private rail line passed through the nearly denuded landscape,

connecting the mines, tipples, and furnaces owned by the company.

One spur of track reached a mile-long row of another two hundred

ovens, visibly pulsating the darkness with their heat. Beyond them,

stretched along a fouled stream cal ed Black Creek, was "Smokey

Row," an encampment of rough-sawn company houses occupied by