Slavery by Another Name (54 page)

World" sung from the square-note hymnals of the Baptist church

had wafted down the muddy streets, now only the crackling of coals

and flames and the glow of an ashen town penetrated the night.

Blacks in Pine Apple—and across the country—couldn't help but

savor the apocalyptic consequences of the white mob's rampage.

After three hundred years of Christian teaching that it was some

curse or providential intent that placed Africans in slavery and the

purgatory that fol owed it, the re could only be seen as the

Almighty's sign that it was the white man earning his vengeance

now. The ames were "reinforced by God's disapprobation," one

black preacher said. Booker T. Washington wrote to a northern al y:

"The white people are now in quite a state of indignation…. One

wonders if the same indignation would have been shown if the

property of the white people had not been burned."24

Whatever anger surged from other whites whose homes and

businesses had been destroyed, the Meltons stil had a wedding to

complete. Four days after the con agration, the Baptist church, far

enough from town to be spared from the re, was l ed for Leila's

nuptials.

The Meltons were never prosecuted, either for the murder of

Arthur Stuart or for the enslavement of so many black workers who

created their wealth. No peonage cases were ever brought in the

area. Adams, the white informant, was so fearful for his life that he

burned al let ers from the U.S. at orney investigating the incident.

burned al let ers from the U.S. at orney investigating the incident.

The perpetrators of the lynching escaped punishment. Local African

Americans did take bit er solace in a nal turn that seemed to

a rm God's contempt for what the white family had done: three

weeks after the wedding, on January 26, young Pig Melton, fevered

from an infection of his wound, died. He was interred a few steps

from his Uncle Wil iam's precipice—near, but just outside, his

imposing elder's stony line of sight.

Every day that passed after the immolation of Arthur Stuart

without response by the federal government was further rati cation

that the African Americans of the South had been returned to the

white men who sought to control them. Almost exactly a year later,

as if a demonstration that no one should interpret the catastrophe

as evidence of any change in the state of black-white relations in

the town, two more black men from Pine Apple, brothers Edward

and Wil iam Plowly, were accused of murdering a white man and

then hanged by a mob.

Indeed, where federal investigators initial y stirred near panic

among slaveholding farmers when they rst arrived in Alabama,

Georgia, and Florida, the impotence of the investigations was

becoming richly obvious. Even when men were brought to trial for

the most egregious o enses, they hardly risked conviction. Even if

found guilty, they were in no real jeopardy of meaningful penalties.

Just as the federal Freedmen's Bureau agents sent into remote

southern towns had learned immediately after the Civil War, the

new representatives of northern justice brought more risk upon

themselves than to any person stil holding slaves.

Indeed it was open season on Secret Service investigators. A

government auditor sent to check the books of Reese's o ce in

February 1904 found that two deputy marshals employed in the

investigation had been hiding out at their homes in rural Alabama

when they were supposed to have been pursuing slavery cases in

the most hostile areas of the state, Lowndes and Dal as counties—

the Swink family home territory. "The reason for this was that the

persons living in said counties had sent word to the District

At orney and his assistants to the e ect that, if they had regard for

At orney and his assistants to the e ect that, if they had regard for

their personal safety, they would not at empt to prosecute the

peonage people in said counties," wrote the examiner.25

Reese insisted the inquiries must proceed. He wrote to

Washington a month later urgently asking for additional help from

Secret Service agents to protect witnesses who testi ed against ve

whites in Pike County. The holders of slaves fought back violently,

he said, burning the sawmil of one white landowner wil ing to

speak against the defendants, set ing black churches a re, and

intimidating large numbers of African American workers who were

eeing the area. "The lumber mil s were shut down and the farming

interests paralyzed," Reese wrote.26 Department of Justice o cials

waited nearly two weeks to reply, and then indicated that no agents

were available at the time.

Reese continued to draw indictments from grand juries in the

Black Belt, but often with lit le result. Charges against one Alex D.

Stephens in early 1904 al eged that Stephens sold a black worker

named Wil iam Brown to a white man in Co ee County named

Samuel W Tyson in July 1902.27At orneys in the state by now knew

the dril for responding to such actions. Tyson pleaded guilty and

was then pardoned. Charges against Stephens and two others

involved in related seizures and sales of black slaves were

dismissed.

Even as the federal investigations seemed to weaken from the

interior, external opposition to the campaign against slavery

mounted. A mass meeting of sawmil and turpentine camp owners

in Tifton, Georgia, convened in April 1904 to plot strategy and

col ect funds for a legal defense of the involuntary servitude used by

virtual y every member of the group. "Every turpentine operator

and saw mil man, as wel as every one employing labor in this

section, feels that they are a ected," wrote a newspaperman who

at ended the meeting.28

Nearly a year had passed since John Pace—the primary target of

Reese's initial investigation—pleaded guilty to holding debt slaves.

His sentence of fty- ve years—with ve to serve—remained

His sentence of fty- ve years—with ve to serve—remained

suspended. There had been no activity in his appeal of the

constitutionality of the statute under which he pleaded guilty, and

Pace had made no e ort to obtain a presidential pardon for his

crimes like the one the Cosbys had obtained. He remained free on a

$5,000 bond signed by his partner in the slaving enterprise,

Fletcher Turner, and his banker, Wil iam Gray29

By now, even Reese had begun to doubt whether the laws on the

U.S. books were actual y su cient to prohibit the holding of slaves.

In legal lings, Pace's lawyers freely conceded that the farmer

admit ed "unlawful y and knowingly holding a person forcibly and

against his wil and requiring such person to labor." But this did not

technical y t the de nition of peonage, they argued, saying the

arcane statute could only be prosecuted in locations where a formal

system of peonage had once existed—as in New Mexico.

Reese believed they might be legal y correct. "I very much fear,"

he wrote to Washington, that Pace's conviction would be overturned

on that argument.30 Since there was no other U.S. law making it a

crime to hold slaves, Pace would forever go free.

At orney General Knox resigned in June 1904 to accept an

appointment to the U.S. Senate. His successor, Wil iam Moody, a

former congressman from Massachuset s and then secretary of the

navy, pressed for the existing cases of involuntary servitude

violations to be ful y pursued. But it was obvious that Reese's

enthusiasm for a sweeping assault on new slavery did not arouse

him.

In December of 1904, At orney General Moody made one last

major federal gesture in the campaign against peonage, personal y

arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that the conviction of Samuel M.

Clyat for having two black men seized and enslaved more than

three years earlier should be upheld. Clyat 's slow-moving appeal—

using the same argument as Pace and his fel ow defendants that the

anti-peonage statute couldn't be applied, had nal y reached the

highest court in the land. Three months later, the court surprised

Reese and other government lawyers across the country. Clyat won

Reese and other government lawyers across the country. Clyat won

a new trial on minute technical grounds. But the court upheld the

validity of the anti-peonage statute.31

The practical import of the ruling was to sustain the fundamental

il egality of involuntary servitude and of the federal judicial

system's one limited weapon for at acking it. But at the same time,

the opinion by Justice David Brewer also a rmed that the South's

growing practice of using hyper-technical interpretations of U.S.

law to thwart the rights of black men on a wide range of issues—

from segregated schools and housing to voter registration and

government aid for the poor—would be abided by the federal

courts.

Days later, in Savannah, Georgia, Judge Speer, emboldened by the

section of the Supreme Court ruling declaring peonage abhorrent,

ordered from his bench that Georgia's vast system of charging

African Americans in the lower courts of towns and sentencing

them to hard-labor chain gangs was il egal. Speer ordered the

freedom of Henry Jamison, a black man arrested on a charge of

drunk and disorderly conduct and then sentenced to spend 210 days

chained into a work crew repairing roads in Macon. The judge

found that local courts had no power to order such penalties for

pet y and largely unde ned crimes such as vagrancy, drunkenness,

or throwing trash in the street. "Enforced labor on a local chain-

gang, imposed for an o ense not amounting to crime, is involuntary

servitude and peonage, in the light of the decision of the United

States Supreme Court, no mat er what the state law or the

municipal ordinances on the subject may be," Speer wrote. "Let but

this crime continue, we wil al be slaves. We wil be slaves to our

prejudices, slaves in that like slaves we tolerate the violation of the

constitution and the law which we are sworn to support; slaves

because we slavishly fail or refuse to perform a lofty civic duty"32

Speer's ruling rippled across the southern landscape. Here was a

legal rationale far more sweeping than anything previously

articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.

articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.

Under the logic of Judge Speer, thousands—perhaps tens of

thousands—of African Americans being held against their wil to

work o nes levied for trivial, al eged misdemeanors should be

freed.

Back in Montgomery, Reese recognized the import of the decision

instantly. Just a few weeks earlier, he had convinced another grand

jury to hand up sixteen additional indictments on peonage charges

against men in another section of Alabama. But Reese could see the

inef ectual nature of the scat ershot prosecutions. There were clearly

thousands of African Americans being coerced into labor, and

contrary to Judge Jones's original hopes, convictions in a few high-

pro le cases weren't causing other whites to abandon the practice.

Reese knew a broader and more sustained at ack was the only

hope. In Speer's ruling, Reese saw a basis for chal enging the root of

the South's forced labor blight—the system of sel ing convicts

fol owed by the state of Alabama, nearly al of its counties, and at

least a half dozen other southern states.

Then came an astounding revelation, a discovery that must have

been the most dispiriting setback yet in the two years since Reese

made his vow to root out slavery for President Roosevelt. The U.S.

at orney learned that John Pace, his original nemesis in Tal apoosa

County, continued to hold African Americans in involuntary

servitude. "There are two boys ages fteen and sixteen respectively

who are now il egal y restrained of their liberty on the farm," Reese

wrote to his superiors. The teenagers were almost certainly Luke

and Henry Tinsley one of the pairs of brothers James M. Kennedy

had enumerated on the Pace farm during the census ve years

earlier.

Like many other blacks overlooked by investigators and grand

jurors during the probe of Pace's operation, the Tinsleys were never

discovered during the federal inquiry. Now Reese learned the

children had been il egal y held by Pace since 1897—eight years