Slavery by Another Name (44 page)

driving in Alabama has pricked the conscience of the nation,"

proclaimed The Nation on June 11.55

After the meeting, the at orney general authorized what

amounted to the most sweeping federal investigation into the

working conditions of southern blacks since the Civil War. He

directed U.S. at orneys in Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, and in

the southern sections of Georgia to begin inquiries in their districts,

including the densely populated Black Belt, and other areas where

more than a mil ion impoverished African Americans lived. Across

Alabama and Georgia, the prosecutors sent deputy federal marshals

into the countryside with orders to bring back any evidence of

ongoing slavery.

Not since the rst years of Reconstruction had law enforcement

o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

blacks. Suddenly a squad of Secret Service agents led by an

indefatigable detective named Henry C. Dickey, as wel as every

federal marshal across a three-hundred-mile-wide swath of the

South, was quietly, if often reluctantly, quizzing African American

pastors, sharecroppers, and farmhands about the treatment of black

laborers by many of the most prominent white landowners in the

South.

By late June, sixty-three indictments had been returned by the

Montgomery grand jury, and locals expected as many as twenty

more white men to be arrested. The government was holding nearly

thirty black witnesses in a closely guarded boardinghouse in a black

neighborhood of Montgomery. Not al came from Tal apoosa or

Coosa counties. And many witnesses were reported to have

appeared at the federal courthouse from counties other than those

original y targeted in the investigation.

The ten white men from Coosa and Tal apoosa counties who had

been indicted up to that point were summoned to appear in court

on June 22. Pace, Fletcher, and many of the others arrived by an

evening train the previous day. Monday morning they led into

Judge Jones's courtroom for a grueling, hours-long hearing. Soon,

the corridors of the federal building were clogged with lawyers in

dark, vested suits and the curious wandering in from the streets and

the stone steps of the courthouse. Throughout the morning, U.S.

At orney Reese came in and out of the courtroom, consulting

repeatedly with the bat ery of prominent lawyers representing John

Pace.

Montgomery buzzed with speculation. Word rippled through the

onlookers that al charges against Kennedy would be dropped once

he testi ed in open court. By now Kennedy was a pariah among his

longtime friends. His confessions to the grand jury, implicating at

least a dozen other white men, had been widely reported.

Meanwhile, word was spreading of let ers sent the previous day to

every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

accusations against him were false—most especial y testimony that

women had been murdered at the Turner farm. He speci cal y

denied the claim that Sarah Oliver had been brutal y beaten to

death at his place during the previous winter. Then came the day's

most sensational story: Pace planned to plead guilty to the charges

—and then chal enge the validity of the anti-peonage statute to a

higher court.56

The court formal y convened at noon, with U.S. Marshal L. J.

Bryan cal ing the names of men to form petit juries to hear the

evidence in the cases. A large crowd of spectators jammed the

courtroom, craning their necks to catch a glimpse across the gal ery

of the Tal apoosa farmers. Pace, Fletcher Turner and his son, the

three Cosbys, and other defendants sat together on a bench near the

front of the room. At the bar were the half dozen members of their

defense team. The old guard of Alabama was ral ying to the men.

Among the lawyers was Thomas L. Bulger—son of the Tal apoosa

County Confederate war hero, and D. H. Riddle, the Goodwater

at orney who had actual y participated in some of the fake trials

held by his mayor.

Later, the lawyers announced the defense of the Turners had been

joined by Gen. George P. Harrison, a int-eyed lawyer with a jet

black beard in the imperial style of the day. He too was a widely

remembered former Confederate commander, best known for his

central role as a newly appointed colonel in the bloody repulse of

the Union army's most famous black regiment, the 54th

Massachuset s Infantry, during the gruesome bat le for Fort Wagner

in July 1863.

Judge Jones ordered that the trial of Pace, the Cosbys, and John

Kennedy—the newly cooperating witness—begin one week later on

charges of peonage and related crimes. Fletcher Turner and his son,

Al en, would stand trial beginning July 6. A few days later, the trial

of Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit would begin, fol owed within

a week by Jesse Berry and James Todd, two of the enforcers who

helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

After forming two juries and giving them instructions from the

bench, Judge Jones turned to the crowd, warning that any person

who entered the court with a weapon would be "sent to the

penitentiary" for contempt of court.

Before the day ended, Reese announced that additional

indictments had been issued against J. Wilburn Haralson, of

Dadevil e, and John G. Dunbar, the former city marshal of

Goodwater then serving as marshal in Columbus, Georgia. New

charges were also announced against the Turners, for holding a

black woman named Camil a Hammond. In total, the grand jury

had issued ninety-nine indictments against a total of fteen

defendants. Pace alone faced twenty-two counts.

Lawyers for the defendants urged Judge Jones to delay the trial

to give the farmers time to harvest their elds and to study the

"peculiar" and unfamiliar charges they faced. Reese said the farmers

had created the situation for themselves and that black witnesses

were being held in Montgomery to protect them from intimidation

before trial. "The government is not at liberty to give in detail the

instances of this kind," Reese said. "But it can be said that

intimidation both of witnesses and grand jurors have been going on

in connection with these peonage cases."

Judge Jones concluded that a speedy trial would not burden the

defendants unfairly, and made clear that he feared ef orts to frighten

the witnesses. "The court has nothing to conceal, gentlemen," Judge

Jones said. "In a great many of these cases intimidation has been

practiced. A witness has been taken from a train. I need not say

more. These cases must be tried as early as possible consistent with

proper opportunity to make defense."

It was clear that black witnesses were in danger. For days, Reese

had been gathering African Americans critical to the trial in

Montgomery, housing thirty of them under federal guard in "negro

boardinghouses." At one point in the proceedings, Secret Service

agent Capt. Henry C. Dickey arrested two black schoolteachers who

went to the boardinghouse posing as detectives sent by Judge

Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

government agents, apparently to report back to Pace and the other

whites.

Before any of the trials began, federal o cials learned that

Tal apoosa County had appointed a deputy marshal speci cal y "to

keep an espionage on the negro witnesses of the government,"

reported Montgomery newspapers.57

Until the day of the arraignments, most of Alabama's political elite

and the white general public had imagined that the slavery

investigation was entirely the handiwork of the White House and its

representative in Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese. Judge Jones's

directions to the grand jury a week earlier were startling, but his

confusing equivocation after denouncing involuntary servitude left

open the question of where Jones's true al egiances rested. Across

the South, newspapers and politicians stil banked on the fact that

he would uphold a wel -honed ritual of southern posturing in high-

pro le court cases involving blacks: factitiously expressing the

importance of legal rights for African Americans while

simultaneously ensuring no harm to a white defendant and

aggressively curtailing redress to the black victim.

"It turns out that the main mover in Alabama to break up what is

cal ed the peonage system, whereby convicts are held to labor

inde nitely by white men, who pay their penal nes and contract

their labor in return, is Judge Thomas G. Jones, ex-governor of the

state," wrote the Atlanta Constitution. "If there is anything criminal

in the system, that criminality should be exposed and punished

properly, and whatever of false hue and cry there is on the a air

should be exposed." 58

The Montgomery Advertiser continued to proclaim mock surprise

at the discovery of forced labor in Alabama: "The character of

o ense was peculiar and unknown in this country since the

emancipation of the negroes. It was practical y and to al intents the

enslavement of men for a period of time in violation of State and

Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

deal of testimony given …few of …the people of Alabama …ever

dreamed of such things as seem to have existed."59

As the rst trial neared, however, it was clear that Judge Jones

was deviating from the script. He appeared to be serious. The

Advertiser, alarmed that a southern leader would join with a

Republican president from New York to at ack southern whites

who resubjugated blacks, poured forth with what had become the

ascendant view of turn-of-the-century white southerners. "A

sentiment that is now practical y unanimous throughout the

Southern States … is that we, the white men of the South, propose

to set le racial questions in our own way and in our own time. And

we wil do it in the way best for both races," the newspaper

editorialized.

Several millions of ex-slaves, suddenly exalted to citizenship, was the

heritage we received from the Federal government. As if the mere fact of

their presence in changed conditions was not serious enough, they were

endowed with all the political rights that any citizen of the Union

possessed, and for which they were neither prepared nor tted. And then,

to add to the bitterness of our degradation, and the hopelessness of the

problem, our country was overrun with adventurers from the North, some

of them good and well meaning men, but others as unprincipled

scoundrels as ever scuttled a ship or robbed a safe. It was these and their

kind who made the condition of the Southern people unbearable and

revolt inevitable.

Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but

some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses

that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies,

many of whom were federal o cials, against whose acts our people were

practically powerless. And one of the worst features of this saturnalia was

that the ballot in the hands of ex-slaves was in almost every instance, both

from their own ignorance and at the instigation of their carpet-bag allies,

used to despoil, degrade and humiliate the real citizens of the almost

helpless South.

The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

which they should be applauded—declining to resume armed

rebel ion against the federal government and instead only stripping

African Americans of the right to vote and most other legal rights.

That northerners would complain about this—and that some

southerners agreed—was infuriating.

What do we see? All over the North we nd public speakers and

newspapers assailing our methods and our people and in every way, as

words can do, inciting the colored people to resist, fomenting discord

between the races and in many cases maligning and vilifying the Southern