Slavery by Another Name (27 page)

repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,

repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,

along with W.D.'s twenty-seven-year-old son, Burancas, worked the

black men and women they acquired on their own farms and also

engaged in a sideline of resel ing workers to smal er-scale farmers

nearby.

Between the fal of 1901, when John Davis was arrested in

Goodwater, and the spring of 1903, the three families—Pace,

Turner, and Cosby— bought at least eighty African American men

and women. Like the hundreds of undocumented forced workers

tal ied in the Sloss-She eld mine in 1895, none of those captured

near Goodwater ever appeared among the thousands of "o cial"

convict laborers sold by the state of Alabama and its counties. The

true total seized by the three families was almost certainly far

higher.13

A day after his arrest, John Davis stil didn't know what charge he

had been convicted of, or how much money Robert Franklin falsely

claimed he owed. After a one-hour rail ride to Dadevil e and then a

ten-mile trip by horse and wagon to a ve-hundred-acre farm at the

meeting of the Tal apoosa River and Big Sandy Creek, Davis faced

the hoary form of John W. Pace.

Pace was a towering gure. He loomed over most men, more

than six feet tal and weighing at least 275 pounds. Despite his

fortune, he stil routinely appeared in town in a col arless,

homespun shirt, homemade shoes, and a broad-brimmed black hat

—his face was ush from a life of work outdoors. By 1900, he

showed signs of gout and walked awkwardly—which he explained

as the result of severe frostbite to his feet in the past.14

Davis was pul ed from the wagon and forced to stand before the

old farmer. Pace, further confusing the contradictory bogus charges,

proclaimed that the black man owed Pruit $40 for goods

purchased at a store in Goodwater. Now he claimed Davis also

owed Franklin $35 for nes and costs from his conviction.15 Davis

had two choices, Pace said: to pay $75 immediately or agree to be

taken under his control.

taken under his control.

Davis had no choice. He had no money at al . Pace promptly

produced a two-page handwrit en contract on which Davis, who

could not read or write his name, scrawled an "X." The contract

signed, Pace paid Pruit and Franklin $75. The coerced contract was

a sham, and il egal on its face. Court decisions already in force

made it clear that even if Davis had been legitimately convicted of a

crime, he could not legal y be held on the conviction once his ne

had been paid—as Franklin and Pruit claimed they had done.

Regardless, Davis knew only that he had marked a document that

he was told obligated him to work at any task Pace demanded for

ten months, to repay the $75 Pace had "advanced" him to pay the

nes. Most signi cantly, Davis had unwit ingly agreed to language

that appeared in dozens of such contracts that Pace and others

intimidated black laborers to sign.

Under the documents, the blacks Pace acquired "agree[d] to be

locked up in the cel at night" and submit to "such treatment as

other convicts."16The contracts further authorized "that should the

said Pace advance me anything over and above what he had already

furnished me, I agree to work for him under this contract until I

have paid for same in ful ." The additional charges explicitly

included any costs resulting from a laborer at empting to escape the

farm. Most ominously, the documents al owed Pace to "hire me out

to any person, rm or corporation in the state of Alabama—at such

sum as he may be able to hire me at for a term su cient to pay

him al that I may owe him."17

For al practical purposes, Pace owned John Davis.

John Pace arrived in Tal apoosa County at the age of twenty- ve in

1879, a time when set lement towns and farms were stil being

carved from unmarked forests. Most land was dense red clay,

ecked with shards of igneous rock, layered upon the anks of

infertile ridgelines cut ing asymmetrical y to the north and east.

Gold was mined there in the 1830s and the 1840s, and the urry of

early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.

early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.

Almost ten miles from the deep Tal apoosa River, Dadevil e had a

railroad station, a few stores, and a livery stable. Set ing it apart

from other hard-edged outposts was a smal medical institute—a

source of southern physicians since before the Civil War.

By the 1880s, the rich mineral veins were tapped out. The al ure

of cot on had replaced the magnetic at raction of gold. Farmers and

tradesmen like Pace were slipping in from Georgia and other parts

of Alabama to begin a new, more orderly domestication of the land.

Growing numbers of them worked in exasperation to clear the trees

and scratch crops out of rocky elds on the low ridges. But along

the Tal apoosa River lay a wide spine of rich al uvial soil running

through the center of the county. On that bot omland plain, where a

creek cal ed Big Sandy emptied into the Tal apoosa, spread one

great tableau of at, fertile land. Pace set out to obtain al of it he

could, and make his fortune there.

Pace had never been troubled by slavery, or any other manner of

the white man's control of blacks in the odd postwar world. For

that mat er, hardly any man Pace had ever met objected. He had

been only nine years old when his family's slaves were emancipated

from their Georgia farm during the Civil War. One of them, a girl

named Catherine, only a few years younger than he, never

departed. She took the Pace family name and, despite freedom,

grew to middle age as a servant in his Tal apoosa County home.

There were no il usions in this section of Alabama about the

nature of relations between black men and white. No one laid

claim to the stylized hoop-skirt vision of antebel um life embraced

in the Old South fantasies that were becoming the vogue in the rest

of the United States. Eastern Alabama had never been suited to vast

plantations where paternalistic slave masters and contented black

servants supposedly lived before the war. Black men and women in

Tal apoosa County were there to be worked, worked hard like

mules. Notwithstanding whatever the Thirteenth Amendment said

about slavery, if white people wanted to buy "Negroes" like mules,

sel them, trade them, or whip them, there was nothing wrong

about that to Pace either.

about that to Pace either.

Before the war, a slave owner named Gum Threat owned another

Tal apoosa river plantation not far from where Pace established his

rst farm. He handled his slaves in the nal years before

emancipation with indi erent brutality. "I en they ever was a devil

on this earth it was Gum Threat," recal ed one of his former slaves a

half century later. "He jest didn't have any regard for his slaves. He

made ‘em work from daylight to dark and didn't give them any

more food and clothes than they could possibly git along with. He

beat them for everything they done and a lot they didn't."

After an escaped slave named Charles Posey was dragged back to

Threat's plantation, the master stood above him on the edge of his

front porch and kicked the man under the chin. "You could hear his

neck pop. He fel to the ground and kicked around like he was

dying," recal ed the former slave who witnessed the punishment.

"They brought him to and then Gum Threat stripped him to the

waist and took him into an old building, stretched him out and

fastened his feet and hands wide apart. Then he took a live coal of

re as big as your hand and laid it in the middle of his bare back. I

remember seeing the scar there and it was about one-eighth of an

inch deep."18

John Pace recognized the value of restoring forced black labor as

soon as he arrived in Tal apoosa. Soon after the Civil War's end, the

probate judge in Dadevil e, who ran the county government,

adopted the practice of parceling out arrested blacks to farmers

who were wil ing to pay for them. Pace successful y ran for county

sheri and quickly absorbed how pro tably black men could be

rounded up and put to work in his own commercial interest, and

what lit le glimmer of judicial process was necessary to hide slavery

behind a guise of prisoners working o legal penalties for actual

crimes.

By 1885, just six years after buying his rst two hundred acres of

Tal-lapoosa river bot om, Pace reached an agreement with the

county judge to lease every prisoner sentenced to hard labor, as

wel as any unable to pay nes and court costs. As in almost every

Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.

Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.

Fifty years after Gum Threat's assaults on his slaves, life was lit le

changed for the new slaves of Tal apoosa County. Not far from

Pace's spread, a man named B. S. Smith operated a large farm and

timber operation on the banks of the Tal apoosa. He contracted

directly with the state of Alabama to acquire several hundred men

found guilty in state courts of felony o enses. In addition, Smith

and his wife, Elizabeth, aggressively sought scores of other forced

laborers from counties across Alabama. After the couple wrested the

contract for Autauga County prisoners away from W. D. McCurdy in

1883, Mrs. Smith complained to the county sheri that one worker

had disappeared during the transfer from McCurdy's notoriously

brutal Lowndes County farm to hers.19 By the mid-1880s, the Smith

plantation degenerated into a miserable compound of rampant

disease and death.

In 1886, a black prisoner named Alex Crews died at the Smith

convict farm from complications of severe frostbite to his feet. A

state physician visited on January 30, 1886, and reported back to

the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts. "I found the clothing of the

convicts very defective, being thin and worthless, insu cient for

protection during the cold weather. Many of them had no shoes

beyond a sole tied to their feet, there being no uppers and some

with no protection for the feet except rags tied around them. I told

Mr. Smith that the clothing and sanitary condition of the men were

miserable and outrageous."20

A reporter for the Montgomery Daily Dispatch, a black

newspaper in the state capital, wrote that one of its reporters had

asked Crews on his deathbed whether there were other men on the

Smith farm as il as he. "Oh, yes, boss," Crews replied. "Some of

them are a heap worse." The fol owing month, the president of the

Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Col. Reginald H. Daw-son, visited

the farm and reported back to Governor Edward O’Neal that he

found "seven convicts more or less frostbit en, and that one of them

…wil probably die."21 The state took no action.

Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his

Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his

landholdings and his purchases of black men in tandem

proportions. As his operations grew, he employed a growing

number of white men to manage various enterprises and portions

of the farm. In the spring of 1892, he hired the justice of the peace,

James Kennedy, who had just married the younger sister of Pace's

wife, Mol ie. Pace had raised Mol ie almost as a daughter, and

Kennedy became in e ect his rst son-in-law. After a few months

spent running a limestone quarry in the adjacent county, Kennedy

set led into a house 150 yards from that of Pace and took over the

older man's sawmil and its squads of black hands.

Six years later, Pace added Anderson Hardy to the payrol , a man

just a few years his junior but the new husband of Pace's nineteen-

year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He lived in a house adjacent to Pace's

and acted as a foreman of the farm, guard, and, frequently, the

designated whipping boss to lash noncompliant workers.

Pace had become a great landowner by the standards of the

province and his era, with nearly a thousand acres of property

under til at the Big Sandy Creek farm and ownership of several

blocks, including a second home, in downtown Dadevil e.22 Like

many in Tal apoosa County, he also harbored visions that gold

might once again be found in the area, and purchased a half interest