Slavery by Another Name (50 page)

to the United States.)

Amid that swel ing wave of public sentiment, shared by the

simplest and most advanced white Americans, the moral

implications of the Civil War faltered. More than thirty- ve years

had passed since the end of the con ict, long enough that the grief

and anger associated with individual deaths and disasters had

muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a

muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a

national voting bloc. In place of the war's fading emotional

resonance, a cult of reunion and reconciliation among whites in al

regions arose, embraced by leaders of al national parties who had

grown weary of the "bloody shirt"—a euphemism for demagogic

political tactics designed to stir regional emotions.

There was a palpable sense that northerners were no longer

wil ing to risk renewed violence to enforce a thinly supported

victor's justice on the South. Al demands for southern acquiescence

to guilt for the war were dissolving. A generation of post-Civil War

southerners—like Pace, McRee, and their contemporaries—were

approaching middle age. They were anxious to redeem their fathers

who fought and died in southern regiments and the skil of the

o cers who led them from the tarnish of defeat, the scandal of

treason, and the perceived amorality of slavery. Southerners—and

growing numbers of northern whites—gravitated to a new

interpretation of the rebel ion, one that abandoned any depiction of

the war as a defeated insurrection and instead permit ed open

reverence for southern "qualities" of bat le eld ferocity and social

chivalry, and for speci c acts of Confederate heroism to be

incorporated into col ective American history.

Georgia's federal judge Emory Speer, overseeing the new slavery

cases emerging in southern Georgia, summed up the new

conventional history in his 1903 commencement speech to

graduates of Atlanta's Emory University. Taking the life of Robert E.

Lee as his topic, Judge Speer cal ed for an explicit rehabilitation of

the once disgraced Confederate military commander. America, he

said, "can no longer a ord to question the military and personal

honor of Lee and his noble compatriots. America, with al her

acknowledged power, cannot fail to appropriate that warlike

renown, which gleamed on the bayonets and blazed in the serried

vol eys of the soldiers of the South."14

The South had nothing to be ashamed of anymore. The myth that

the war had been fought over regional patriotism rather than

slavery became rooted in American identity. Even slavery itself

came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American

came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American

society, but as a nearly benign anachronism. White Americans

arrived at a contradictory but rm view that slavery was a relic of

the past that had rightful y expired, but that coerced servitude and

behavior was nonetheless the appropriate role in national life for

blacks. Whites in the North and the South could be on the same

side in this perverse recasting of the war's narrative. That new

consensus unleashed typhonic waves across black life.

The blithe testimony of an elderly black man to a Georgia

legislative commission inquiring into nancial improprieties in that

state's convict leasing system il ustrated the gratuitous cynicism that

steeped the lives of African Americans. In June 1901, the man,

named Ephraim Gaither, was being held in a work camp for men

arrested and convicted of minor o enses at an isolated location

about fty miles north of Atlanta. Gaither had been arrested on a

dubious charge of carrying a concealed weapon. After conviction,

he was sold along with 105 other men to a timber-cut ing operation

control ed by one of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, Joel

Hurt. That month, a sixteen-year-old boy arrived in the camp to

serve three months of hard labor for an unspeci ed misdemeanor

he had al egedly commit ed.

"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking of

and got to trot ing a lit le bit, playing around there and got behind

a pine tree," Gaither recounted calmly, in testimony to the

commit ee of Georgia elected o cials. "There was a young fel ow,

one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at

the lit le negro and shot this side of his face o ," Gaither said as he

pointed to the left side of his face.

The fellow runs o to the woods about thirty or forty yards and the

guards follow him. Then Charley Goodson, he goes and gets the dog and

puts on the trail of him and they start off, the dogs are barking the way the

negro went o . Directly they came back and I heard one of the guards say

that negro he done and goes across the mountain and we can't get him.

That is when they come back with the dogs and everything was quiet. That

was on Thursday, Thursday evening. They let that negro stay there lying in

the woods from Thursday to Thursday and it gets to stinking so bad we

couldn't stand it hardly; and we complained about the smell. That day we

noticed a bitch, a hound bitch it was going across by the edge of the

woods with something in its mouth and we looked and seed that it was the

arm of that poor negro that they had killed down there in the woods. The

dog had torn the arm o of him and was dragging it down through the

edge of the woods with the ngers dragging on the ground. The Bosses

took John Williams and two or three others, I don't remember the names

now and made him a pine box and went down there and buried him.

Members of the commit ee responded by gril ing Gaither about

why he came to the state capitol that day to testify and whether a

black man's word could be trusted. "Did any white men see that?"

asked one state representative, about the events described by

Gaither. Another quizzed Gaither as to whether any white man in

Atlanta could vouch for him. Final y he was asked: "You were a bad

negro?"

Gaither responded: "No boss, I was no bad negro. They thought I

was." No queries were made as to the identities of the boy kil ed,

the camp boss who shot him, or why myriad state regulations

governing the treatment of prisoners at the time or the handling of

a convict's death were never ful l ed.15 The homicide Gaither

described was never investigated.

The harvest of that river of animosity was palpable for thousands of

African Americans. A venomous contempt for black life was not just

tolerated but increasingly celebrated. On Tybee Island o the coast

of Georgia, guards drove a squad of black men arrested by the local

sheri into the surf to bathe. Few could swim. Weighed down by

bal s and chains, four were swept into the sea. The body of

misdemeanant Charles Walker surfaced a day later on the edge of

nearby Screven Island.16

When a black man in Henderson, North Carolina, refused to give

up his reserved seat in a local theater to a white patron in April

1903, he was forcibly ejected. When he resisted being removed, the

1903, he was forcibly ejected. When he resisted being removed, the

black man was shot dead by a policeman.17 White southerners

applauded broadly.

A white mob seized an African Methodist Episcopal minister in

Lees-burg, Georgia, named Rev. W W Wil iams that spring after he

began to emerge among local blacks in the farm community as an

in uential leader. White men owned nearly al the area's land and

were accustomed to the same conjugal rights with black women on

their farms as had existed during antebel um slavery. Rev. Wil iams

began preaching that black women should resist the sexual

advances of the dominant white men of the community, wrote Rev.

J. E. Sistrunk, in an account of the at ack sent to the Department of

Justice. "The mob …went upon him without warning and taken

him out of the parson aide [parsonage] …and strip[p]ed him

naked and one sat upon his h[e]ad and each by turns with a buggy

whip, whipped him until his back was raw from head to foot and

after whipping him they told him that they whipped him because

he was control ing colored women."18

Southerners particularly reveled at gruesome scenes of racial

violence that occurred outside their region, a rming the hypocrisy

of those Yankee critics who stil criticized racial conditions in the

former Confederacy. For weeks, carnage continued between blacks

and whites in Joplin, Missouri, and Wilmington, Delaware. In April,

a thirty-year-old black man named Thomas Gilyard was lynched in

Joplin, fol owed by the reported expulsion of every black in the

city19 In May, newspapers closely fol owed a "race war" in

Louisvil e, Kentucky20

Accounts of mortal clashes between whites and blacks, and the

raging mobs that often fol owed such incidents, lit ered the pages of

newspapers in the rst years of the century. "Race War in

Mississippi," the Advertiser screamed in May 1903, after blacks and

whites near the town of Laurel bat led over several days, leaving at

least one white farmer and "several negroes" dead. "The enraged

white men of the community are stil in the saddle searching for the

negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic

negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic

thril .21

The same month, whites in Indianapolis, Indiana, began meeting

to formulate a plan for removing African Americans from the city.

Independence Day 1903 stirred extraordinary black and white

hostility. In the tiny South Carolina town of Norway, a white

farmer's son severely beat four black workers. In retaliation, the

father, a one-armed Confederate veteran, was gunned down at his

dinner table with a shotgun blast through a window. Local whites

seized a black man in retaliation and lynched him. In response,

more than two hundred armed blacks surrounded the town on July

4, threatening to burn it to the ground. The state's governor

dispatched the South Carolina militia to counterat ack.22

In Evansvil e, Indiana, crowds of blacks and whites bat led on

July 5 over the fate of a black man accused of kil ing a white police

o cer. Whites successful y broke into the city jail, but were driven

back by armed blacks. Police charged in to disperse the crowds and

spirit away the accused man.

On the same day, a mob of six hundred whites went in search of

a black woman in Peoria, Il inois, who was accused of having

beaten a white boy. After discovering that the woman already was

in jail, the crowd at acked her home, dismantling it to the

foundation and throwing al her furniture and belongings into the

Il inois River. In Thomasvil e, Georgia, a street argument between a

black man and his wife accelerated into a running gun ght between

a white posse and crowds of African Americans.23

The New York Times opined in mid-July 1903 that "respectable

negroes" should ban the city's bad ones. "There are in New York

thousands of ut erly worthless negro desperadoes," the Times wrote,

"gamblers when they have money and thieves when they have none,

moral lepers and more dangerous than wild animals." The

newspaper fol owed up later in the month with hysterical coverage

of racial disturbances in the city. "Negroes At ack Police" blared a

headline over an account of a ght that broke out on West 62nd

Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

on a sidewalk.24

Infuriated by the setbacks su ered by blacks in al regions of the

country, W. E. B. DuBois, the rising young sociologist—the rst

African American Ph.D. graduated by Harvard—wrote that the

South "is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk." The

emancipation act that had ended the Civil War had transmogri ed

into "a race feud," he said. "Not a single Southern legislature stood

ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the pol s; not a

single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible

without a system of restrictions that took al its freedoms away;

there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly

regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nul i cation as a

duty"25

X

THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."

Warren Reese refused to believe the white South was