Slavery by Another Name (60 page)

free African American miners, many of whom had survived their

time in the prison shaft and then stayed on in the town to dig coal

for pay.

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. had always been reluctant

for politicians, the public, or the region's embryonic unions to

realize how lucrative its army of forced laborers had proven to be.

Company o cials publicly complained about the shiftless and

uninspired work of prison laborers and black workers in general.

They accused sheri s of palming o sick and dying men to the

mines.

But in fact, the economic value of the slaves scooped up by labor

agents across Alabama was enormous. In August 1903, just as Judge

Jones was issuing his peonage ruling that, counter to its intention,

rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,

rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,

Erskine Ramsey, the longtime chief of the Tennessee's company

operations, was privately gloating at the pro tability of relying on

slaves. "The operation of the convict mines has been very

remunerative," Ramsey wrote in a let er to Henry Clay Frick, the

notorious Pit sburgh industrialist.22 After building his own coke and

coal company in the 1880s and 1890s, with forty thousand acres of

coal elds and twelve thousand coke ovens, Frick became partners

with Andrew Carnegie, eventual y taking over management of

Carnegie Steel Company.

Frick was most wel known as the man who during the 1892

Homestead incident ordered a smal army of company detectives to

make war on workers striking at a Carnegie plant on the

Monongahela River in Pennsylvania. A dozen people died.

Eventual y, the state governor sent in eight thousand militiamen to

end the ghting. The strike—and organizing union—were crushed.

In 1901, Frick guided Carnegie Steel into the merger that created

U.S. Steel. Two years later, Frick was one of the wealthiest

individuals in the United States, if not the world, and continued to

invest periodical y in other industrial enterprises.

Ramsey had known Frick his entire adult life—literal y growing

up as a mechanic in a Frick coal mine supervised by his father.

Later, Ramsey was a prodigy executive in the Frick company,

becoming its youngest-ever mine manager. An uncanny engineer

and inventor, he moved to Alabama in 1887 to become chief mine

engineer for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. In 1903, Ramsey,

who recently had been pushed out of his role as the top o cial at

TCI, was quietly scheming to create a new coal conglomerate in

Birmingham. Eventual y he would establish Prat Consolidated Coal

Company, which grew to rival the Prat Mines in size and scope.

(The two operations shared the name of Alabama's rst frontier

industrialist, Daniel Prat , after whom Alabama's biggest coal eld

was named. But the two enterprises were completely independent

of each other.)

Ramsey wrote Frick to test his interest in investing in the new

projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor

projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor

systems in the mines, but in his let er to Frick the engineer

combined a recitation of his last successes at Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad, unveiled at acks on the new management, and provided a

report on how ef ectively forced laborers could be managed.

Ramsey wrote that just before leaving the company, he opened a

new mine, Slope No. 10, at the Prat Mines complex. Transferring

convicts taken from the company's rst slave mine, No. 1, the new

prison was successful y obtaining the "cheapest coal ever produced

by the Company"—at a cost of 50 cents a ton. Powered by access to

an extraordinarily inexpensive and indefensible source of labor, the

company reached a record output of 3.4 mil ion tons of coal in

1900 and continued averaging three mil ion or more tons a year

into the next decade. The racial nature of the system was obvious.

Of the nearly one thousand convicts in the two mines, no more than

seventy were white.23 Without forced laborers, Ramsey's startling

successes would have been impossible.

A year after Ramsey's let er to Frick, white miners launched their

most ambitious strike ever against Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,

seeking acknowledgment of their new union as a col ective

bargaining entity. Readying for bat le, the company shut down their

least e cient furnaces, and most signi cantly, converted two more

mines from free workers to forced laborers.24

The strike col apsed within twelve months. Explaining the

company's rationale for crushing the union, Don Bacon, the

president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad told The Wal Street

Journal: "Conditions forced upon the management …had become

intolerable. The authority over your property …had to be restored

and maintained, or al hope of permanent, successful competition

…would have to be abandoned."25

Slavery, and the ability to obliterate free labor a orded by

coerced workers, was seminal to the company's success. It continued

to aggressively seek more and more compulsory workers—from the

state of Alabama, from any city or county, from any source that

would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired

would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired

from the family of Fletcher Turner—partner in John Pace's brutal

forced labor operation—the limestone quarry at Calcis, where so

many men seized o the back roads had been forced into

slavery26The Turner family, quietly back in the trade of black men

after Fletcher Turner's pardon, continued to operate the quarry for

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

• •

Nearly a thousand miles—and seemingly a half century in time—

removed from the frightening Turner quarry, a historic series of

capital events was unfolding in the fal of 1907. A syndicate of Wal

Street investors, backed by brokerage rm Moore & Schley, bought

a majority stake in the shares of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Armed with new nancing from the syndicate, the company

launched a major expansion of steelmaking capacity. Its output of

iron ingots increased to 400,000 tons in 1906. The fol owing year,

it won an order for 157,000 tons of steel rails for the Union Paci c

and Southern Paci c railroads—a direct chal enge to the hegemony

of U.S. Steel Corporation, the great conglomerate of the North.27

But economic turmoil around the world was rat ling the network

of trusts that had come to dominate Wal Street. These highly

speculative banks and nanciers paid exorbitant interest rates,

maintained lower cash reserves, invested heavily in risky schemes,

and backed investors seeking to monopolize key commodities. The

future of the great trusts was also in growing doubt due to a push

by President Roosevelt to punish John Rockefel er's Standard Oil. A

wide-ranging criminal indictment of Standard Oil, al eging il egal

pricing practices, rat led the market. In late October, the failure of

two prominent stock speculators in a bid to take over United

Copper Company led to the bankruptcy of two Wal Street

brokerages, a bank, and another mining company. As word spread

of the failed scheme and its e ect on other prominent bankers,

panic set into the markets. Suddenly, multiple trust banks were

under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to

under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to

disintegrate.

To stave o a complete col apse of the New York Stock Exchange

and the national depression that might fol ow, J. P. Morgan,

patriarch of the gilded Morgan Bank and architect of the 1901

merger that had created U.S. Steel, began propping up ailing trust

banks and investment houses with infusions of his own cash and

from other bankers working with him. On October 28, Morgan and

two other bankers agreed to loan $30 mil ion to the city of New

York, to prevent a failure of the local government.

Five days later, stil bat ling to hold Wal Street together, Morgan

concluded that he needed to simultaneously rescue three

desperately threatened investment houses, Trust Company of

America, Lincoln Trust, and Moore & Schley, the brokerage that had

backed the takeover the previous year of Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Co. The rm's shares of TCI had been placed as col ateral

for $25 mil ion in loans that Moore & Schley could not pay o . It

would soon be forced to liquidate the stake—the beginnings of a

sel -of that Morgan believed might wreck Wal Street.

Morgan proposed that U.S. Steel prevent the dumping of Moore

& Schley's stock by buying the stake for a fraction of its value. In

return, the presidents of the great Wal Street trusts had to agree to

provide $25 mil ion to help bail out the other banks. Henry Clay

Frick, stil a major owner of U.S. Steel, recognized the potential y

vast value of obtaining Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's mineral

holdings and of eliminating it as a competitor. The chief executive

of U.S. Steel, a former Il inois judge named Elbert H. Gary closely

al ied with Morgan, agreed to the purchase only on the condition

that the White House rst give a promise not to at ack the deal as a

violation of new anti-monopoly laws.

After an al -night negotiation in Morgan's o ces beginning

Saturday, November 2, the terms of the deal were hammered out.

Judge Gary and Frick sped for Washington at midnight in a special

single Pul man car. Interrupting the president's breakfast, they laid

out the details of the transaction to Roosevelt and Secretary of State

Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic

Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic

disaster if the stock markets weren't reassured.

Within twenty minutes, the president, freshly returned from a

Louisiana bear-hunting trip, agreed to support the buyout—one of

the biggest nancial transactions in the history of American

capitalism to that date. Roosevelt wired At orney General Charles J.

Bonaparte that the federal government would not oppose the

merger. Judge Gary cal ed Morgan at his o ces. Word of the deal

spread through Wal Street as the stock exchange opened on

Monday morning. The panic subsided. U.S. Steel took control of

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad for $45 mil ion—a minuscule

fraction of the estimated $1 bil ion value of its Prat Mines and

other assets in Alabama.28

That TCI was the largest customer of the Alabama slavery system

Roosevelt had once championed the destruction of was not

discussed at the White House breakfast. Three weeks later, U.S.

Steel's newly instal ed president of its Alabama property, thirty-

eight-year-old George G. Crawford , signed a new lease to acquire

four hundred prisoners from the state of Alabama for use in the

company's No. 10 and No. 3 mines.

Crawford agreed to pay $42 per month for the strongest laborers

and agreed to pay $10 for the weakest. The contract made clear

that as soon as the company's newest prison mine, a deep shaft

cal ed Slope No. 12, was ready, as many prisoners as possible

would be shifted there.29

XI I

THE ARREST OF

GREEN COTTENHAM

A War of Atrocities

Green Cotenham huddled behind the worn, whitewashed wal s

of the train depot in Columbiana. It was a clear, brisk Thursday

—sunny and crisp before noon, the temperature easing toward

the 70s by early afternoon. Green walked to the train station to play