Slavery by Another Name (28 page)

in May 1894 in a labor-intensive mining venture at his end of the

county23

Powered by the ow of the Big Sandy Creek, the Pace sawmil

teemed with the black laborers he acquired from throughout

Alabama, working under conditions and with technology lit le

changed from the Bibb Steam Mil a half century earlier. Kennedy

oversaw the operation with cold indi erence, and soon began to

branch into other duties desired by Pace.

Thin, ever clad in an inexpensive rumpled jacket, balding

severely except for a few twisted locks at the crown of his forehead,

his voice high-pitched and nasal, Kennedy struck an unat ractive

pro le, a southern Icha-bod Crane, unaccustomed to and il -

equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the

equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the

place, and most likely al of the women, could have knocked him

to the ground. But armed with a buggy whip and his obscure

appointment as a justice of the peace, and backed by the wealthy

white men who paid him, Kennedy was transformed into a

terrifying figure.

Using his status as justice of the peace to convict and sentence

men for misdemeanor o enses, Kennedy became the on-site judge

for Pace's forced labor business. When the Cosby family wanted to

take control of a particular black man, one of the Cosbys would

order an employee to swear out an a davit accusing the African

American of a crime—usual y failure to pay for goods, breaking a

contract to work for the entire planting season, or a charge as

generic as " ghting." Often, the bogus warrants were signed by Jack

Patil o, the young son of a related white family; J. Wilburn

Haralson, another white employee of the farm; or one of several

black workers who lived permanently under the control of the

Cosbys.

Whatever the charge, the Cosbys seized the black man and took

him and their a davit to Pace's farm, where Kennedy would hold

the semblance of a trial. These proceedings never lasted more than

a few minutes, and rarely was any record of the charge or outcome

preserved. There was never an acquit al, according to later

statements by Kennedy. The defendant was always found guilty and

ordered to pay a ne he could not produce, usual y $5 plus the

costs of the arrest and trial—a total of about $20. For a black

laborer at the turn of the century in Alabama, $20 was a sum equal

to at least three months’ work. The Cosbys, who had seized the

black man to begin with, would claim to pay Kennedy the

ostensible ne and fees, and force the prisoner to sign a labor

contract agreeing to work a year or more under guard to pay them

back.

The system worked almost awlessly. Soon the Cosbys were

acquiring so many black men and women that, within a few years,

Kennedy said he could no longer recal most of their names and

faces.24

faces.

The e ciency of having Kennedy convict any black man or

woman desired by a white buyer was also obvious to Pace. There

was no need to remit any portion of the nes to the county courts

or to submit to even the super cial supervision that was sometimes

demanded for the prisoners he purchased directly from the county

jail. Most useful was that when a black man's term of labor neared

an end, Pace, Turner, or the Cosbys could swear out a new warrant

for another supposed crime. Kennedy would obligingly convict

again, and sentence the worker to another six months or year of

hard labor. Soon, the Cosbys arranged for Wil iam D. Cosby to be

named a notary public as wel . After that, in order to further the

ruse of court oversight, the trials were divided between the two

slave farms in a careful y structured theater.

"W. D. Cosby would try Pace's negroes. I would try Cosby's

negroes," Kennedy later explained. "Whenever the time of a man

working for J. W Pace or W. D. Cosby or G. D. Cosby was about out,

they would send somebody before me, if one of Cosby's negroes, to

have an a davit against him on some trumped up charge; and, if

working for Pace, somebody would go before W. D. Cosby and

make an af idavit against him."25

Except for Pace, Turner, and the eldest Cosbys, nearly al of the men

engaged in this labor-sel ing network were in their twenties or

thirties. Most had recently begun their own families. Many were

born during or just after the Civil War and had grown up steeped in

the stories of the roles their fathers or grandfathers played during

the con ict and the chaotic years that fol owed. They were not

descendants of the white ruling class, but hard-scrabble country

whites whose previous generation had fought to defend slavery but

whose members had rarely owned slaves themselves. Al came of

age during the years when African Americans exercised their

greatest level of freedom and political participation in the South. As

children or teenagers they witnessed or heard the stories of the

violent campaigns carried out by their fathers to reestablish white

violent campaigns carried out by their fathers to reestablish white

hegemony in the 1870s and 1880s.

These men emerged into adulthood just as the political parties of

the South were nal y articulating, without reservation, and with

only scant criticism from elsewhere in the country, a rhetoric of

complete white supremacy and total black political exclusion. They

explicitly embraced as personal responsibility a duty to preserve

the new racial regime. The rising young men of Goodwater and

Dadevil e also were motivated by their understanding that unlike

the long-ago era of ful -scale slavery—in which their fathers gained

almost nothing from richer white men's ownership of slaves—the

economic bene ts of the new system of black forced labor were

available to nearly every white man.

The buyers in the new system grasped that lesson bet er than any.

It was they who had forged the new racial order of the South,

through two decades of strife between whites and blacks and

among whites who could not agree on how best to reassert their

control over the region. Pace and Turner had been in the thick of

that fight.

A decade before John Davis was delivered to Pace's farm, as the

April primary election in the pivotal year of 1892 approached,

Pace and Turner led opposing factions amid the tensions aring in

Tal apoosa and every county seat across the state. Borrowing from

the leading newspaper in Birmingham, the local Tal apoosa Voice

bel owed against the continued participation in elections by black

voters in counties where African Americans made up a majority or

large minority of the population. "The one issue before the white

people of Alabama is to maintain the integrity of the white man's

democratic party. This is the one thing to which the party

organization should look. That is the one thing the voter should

address himself to," said one editorial.26

Pace declared himself a backer of Reuben Kolb, along with the

rest of the local Democratic leadership. The ral ying cal of the Kolb

populists became the denunciation of any black participation in the

primary election. Another newspaper al ied with Pace's group, the

primary election. Another newspaper al ied with Pace's group, the

Al iance Herald, mocked the reliance on black votes by the

Bourbon coalition led by Governor Jones. "Oh yes; you are terribly

concerned about white supremacy! While you are …pretending to

be so much exorcised [sic] on the subject, your friends and al ies in

Sumter county are preparing to have negro votes carry that county

for Jones. Negro votes in Marengo and negro votes in Sumter! No

negro has voted for Kolb in this contest."27

Kolb carried the party primary in Tal apoosa County, but lost the

statewide election. Infuriated by the wave of black voting—some of

it fraudulent—that sealed Jones's nomination, the populists

abandoned any pretense of sympathy to African American farmers.

Kolb continued his bid for governor under the ag of a new third-

party "Agrarian" al iance. To ral y voters, his supporters adopted the

most virulent white supremacist invective.

Quoting from a Republican newspaper in Washington, D.C., the

Voice warned local whites of the "feast" that awaited them if ful

citizenship was al owed for blacks:

More than twenty negro Representatives from the South will render the

Republican control of the future Congresses absolutely safe and sure.

Heavy taxes should be laid upon the property of the whites to develop and

extend the public school system of these States. Separate schools of the

two races would be abolished, and the plan of bringing the youth of both

colors into close and equal relation in school and churches given a fair

trial…. The State laws against the intermarriage of the races should be

repealed, and any discrimination against the blacks in the matter of

learning trades or obtaining employment should be a criminal o ence—

while the colored man's rights to hold o ce should be sacredly protected

and recognized.28

The irony that this description was exactly the vision of American

life promised by the U.S. Constitution escaped nearly al southern

whites. Against that backdrop of fury Tal apoosa County Democrats

met in July 1892 to make o cial the county's support for Kolb, the

populist candidate who had won the earlier primary. As the

formalities were concluded, the county's most prominent

formalities were concluded, the county's most prominent

Confederate veteran, Brig. Gen. Michael J. Bulger, a southern hero

of Get ysburg, the war's most decisive bat le, was asked to regale

the crowd at the mass meeting in Dadevil e. But ten minutes into

Bulger's stemwinder on the heroism of the county's storied Civil

War units, Fletch Turner and a rump commit ee of supporters for

incumbent governor Jones barged in and seized the podium.

Through a series of parliamentary maneuvers, Turner's group took

charge of the county party organization and endorsed a new slate of

party nominees—including the local superintendent of education

substituted for Pace in the race for county sherif .29

Jones carried the statewide election by a vote of 127,000 to

116,000, winning twenty-nine counties versus thirty-seven for Kolb.

Despite Fletch Turner's party coup, Tal apoosa stayed in the Kolb

camp. Jones retained the governorship.

Pace and Turner would not argue politics again. A century of

complete white domination of the South was under way. The two

men forged a commercial partnership grounded on the same white

supremacist principles. On the issue of black men, they agreed

completely. Pace and Turner became partners in the business of

buying and sel ing African Americans. Together they signed a new

contract with Tal apoosa County and with the probate judge of

adjoining Coosa County to acquire al the prisoners of both

jurisdictions. Their forced labor network began to thrive.

As the long spare frame of James Kennedy ambled from house to

house down Red Ridge Road in the dusty southern end of

Tal apoosa County in April 1900, the elds were teeming with

black farmhands planting the cot on that would be harvested the

fol owing fal . In another of his remunerative government sidelines,

Kennedy was the appointed federal census taker for the Red Ridge

beat—the section of the county control ed by his employer and

brother-in-law, John Pace. He spent his days that spring busily

listing the 1,250 residents of every household in the district.30

On the approach to the Pace family compound, Kennedy's task

On the approach to the Pace family compound, Kennedy's task

became both more familiar and unset lingly grim. After listing the

members of his own family and the white farmers who adjoined

the sawmil he managed, Kennedy arrived at the crude farm of

Jessie Lisle, a forty-eight-year-old father who worked mostly as a

guard over the blacks held at Pace's farm. Lisle rented a patch of

property from Pace too and with an overgrown family scratched out

a coarse life from a garden and a few pigs and chickens.

Next came the household of Anderson Hardy, the new son-in-law

of Pace. The marriage was only two years past, but Elizabeth Hardy

had already given birth to a child and seen it die. Sharing the house