Slavery by Another Name (58 page)

county was in the sweetest bend of a rising economic curve. More

land was under farm production than at any point since the arrival

of white squat ers a century before. In each harvest since the turn of

the century, Shelby's cot on gins and compresses pumped out more

than ten thousand bales—totaling in excess of ve mil ion pounds

of handpicked ber. The only hint of the coming bol weevil

debacle that a decade hence would sweep in to ravage the elds

were fearful exclamations from farmers in far-away Texas. The

town population, more than two thousand already, was growing at

a heady rate. Two railroads, the Southern Rail Line and the

Louisvil e & Nashvil e, converged at the freight terminal at the end

of Depot Street. A cot on gin, grist mil , and warehouses crowded

the edge of the commercial district, and plans were being nalized

for that most tantalizing of new luxuries, an electric light plant.

Columbiana was brimming with n-de-siècle optimism. Working

furiously to bring a measure of re nement and civic improvement,

stil coarse towns across the South were laying the building blocks

on which twentieth-century American prosperity would rise. The

community's most respected leaders championed e ulgent

campaigns to bring the rst paved streets, public schools, and

shared utility systems—al social advancements careful y engineered

to transform their town but that would also exclude from its

benefits nearly al African Americans.5

benefits nearly al African Americans.

(There was proof to Columbiana of the town's rising

sophistication in Henry Walthal , the son of the sheri and himself

chief deputy at the Shelby County jail a few years earlier. In the

1890s, he helped his father capture and sel black prisoners ful -

time and taught theater on the side. In the summers, he produced

Shakespeare with a local cast until final y joining a traveling theater

company. Removed to the nascent Hol ywood, Walthal starred a

decade later as the Colonel in The Birth of a Nation, D. W Gri th's

1915 blockbuster lm based on the Dixon blockbuster, white

supremacist stage show, The Clansman. The lm was the rst

moving picture ever shown at the White House. President Woodrow

Wilson, a southerner and an open racist, was said to have praised

the film.)

At the monumental cost of $250,000, Shelby County erected a

new courthouse that without exaggeration could be described only

as extraordinary. Replacing an unadorned brick edi ce scu ed and

scarred with more than a half century of unceremonious use, the

new building was a temple to citizen governance and, even more

so, to the county's rising expectations for itself.

At the grand entrance on Main Street, four columns soared fty

feet to an ornate Greek Revival portico. Encircling the roo ine on

every side, a carved parapet railing framed cupolas of hammered

brass leaf on each wing of the building. At the center of the roof

rose an immense octagonal clock tower, looming magni cently

above the town. In the low sun of early evening, the building's

chiseled west facade, constructed of thousands of tons of yel ow

limestone quarried from the ridges above the nearby Coosa River,

glowed luminescently The shadow fal ing to east and south was

nearly large enough to blot out the rest of the town's jumble of

humble red-brick stores and whitewashed houses. The building was

the community's ag plunged into the earth of the new century, a

clear portent of the ambitions of those who led it. A new future was

coming, to be built and shaped in the manner of its new makers.

The architect of this bold new vision, if not of the courthouse

itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

fervent populist, he commanded a nearly mesmerized local

fol owing. How else that a county stil licking its wounds from the

Civil War would agree to borrow a fortune to build the grandest

courthouse in the South? To Longshore, a rate of 6 percent per

annum on county bonds was simply the wage to be paid for a

di erent future. Already, he dressed and looked in the manner of

the new century rather than the last. Above a mustache twisted at

each end and a tiny tufted goatee on the point of his chin, Judge

Longshore looked ahead, only ahead.

From atop the courthouse, Columbiana's other highest spire was

clearly visible at the opposite diagonal of town. With angular

Victorian sternness, it descended sharply into a square tower of

stacked bricks and then three stories down to the iron-barred door

of the Shelby County jail. A dozen dank cel s on the other side of

the building were heated by coal grates and il uminated by shafts of

sunlight coming between the bars on every window. As new

prisoners passed Sheri J. H. Fulton's house next door and

approached the front entrance on West Sterret Street, one odd

window at the top of the jail's tower could not escape their notice.

Almost as tal as a man, circular at the top and rectangular at the

bot om, the opening in the shape of a giant keyhole gave view into

the county's hanging chamber. There, men condemned to die would

arrive on steps from the second- oor cel block and then twist at the

end of a rope, safe from any last e orts to escape their fate, but

with justice stil plainly on view.6

In the newspaper editor's assessment of Columbiana in 1907,

Mac-Knight included just one photograph containing a black face.

Standing, expressionless, with each arm draped on the shoulders of

a young white child in her care, the woman was identi ed only as

"Black Mammy on Duty." On the whole, MacKnight reported that

"the negro population is not excessive, and is orderly and law-

abiding. They have their own churches and schools, and many of

them own their homes. The ease with which a livelihood is made

here renders them independent, and it is not easy to secure either

male or female help from among them."7

male or female help from among them."

Indeed, obtaining African Americans was crucial and sometimes

di cult, as any traveler arriving in Shelby County during the rst

decade of the century would have seen long before the train pul ed

up to the weathered wooden platform in Columbiana. The rails

into and out of town were surrounded by endless vistas of cot on

and its production.

While the twentieth century brought wonders of technological

advancement in the realm of early automobiles, faster trains, and

electric il umination, every square foot of cot on eld was being

tended in a way lit le di erent from how Scipio had done it on the

Cot ingham place in 1840. It took hands. Mil ions of them had to

be available to plow and seed, and mil ions more to hoe and pick.

That meant African Americans. Strong, dependent, docile black

men. The leaders of Shelby County and thousands of other southern

towns and counties were intent on assuring that they could be

found.

The great crusade against involuntary servitude—and especial y

Judge Jones's famous charge to the grand jury and the Supreme

Court's ruling against Georgia's Judge Speer—achieved an

unexpected result for those in the South most reliant on black

backs. Instead of ending the new regimes of forced labor, Judge

Jones's denunciations and the subsequent legal rulings became

guideposts for a reorganization of the contemporary tra c in black

men. Indeed, the further the court opinions decrying peonage

echoed across the southern landscape, the more hol ow they

became.

The Supreme Court's renunciation of Speer's at empt to outlaw

the misdemeanor convict leasing system was so complete that the

opinion was not even writ en, but issued summarily and oral y.

Among the thousands of words of Judge Jones's famous direction to

the federal jury on the de nitions of legal and il egal labor

practices, a single sentence ultimately rose to greatest prominence.

Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

sureties "confessed judgment" for them and worked them against

their wil could avoid violating the peonage statue by fol owing a

simple procedure. The laborers must be convicted in an authentic

court— not by any bumpkin justice of the peace. The judgment and

penalty had to be writ en down and recorded with the local courts.

And the contract between the defendant and the person paying the

ne—in which the defendant agreed to work for a certain amount

of time to pay o the penalty— had to be signed "in open court

with writ en approval of the judge."

The implication was clear. There would be no risk of another

energetic U.S. at orney arresting white farmers for peonage so long

as they, and local judges, were su ciently hygienic in the records

they maintained.

The old southern window dressing of legal rights for African

Americans won the day again. There was no evidence of the decline

anticipated by Reese and Jones in the number of African Americans

being held by private individuals as a result of ostensible court

nes. If anything, the number of black men "confessing judgment"

swel ed, now plainly and unabashedly acknowledged in open court.

Moreover, undaunted by Judge Jones's ruling against the state's

laws forbidding black men from leaving the employment of one

white man without permission to work for another, the Alabama

legislature passed a new but essential y identical "false pretenses"

statute. Once held under a labor contract, black men who at empted

to leave their employers faced criminal prosecution for doing so. If

they had entered into the contract to avoid an earlier prosecution,

the departure would exponential y increase the time they could be

held as slaves.

In Shelby County, the number of African Americans "confessing

judgment" in open court bal ooned.8 Between November 1890 and

August 1906, the dank county jail admit ed 1,327 prisoners, facing

a total of more than 1,500 charges. Physical descriptions were

recorded only intermit ently, but during the periods when notations

of race were made, more than 90 percent of those arrested were

black. A few were women.

black. A few were women.

A fortunate group of 326 prisoners—general y whites and black

men with some modicum of means—were able to scrape together

enough cash to post a bond and obtain freedom until a later trial

date. Most then simply forfeited their bonds and remained free.

Among the 1,001 prisoners left behind, acquit als were

infrequent. Fewer than 250 defendants won their freedom, by virtue

of a not guilty verdict or some other discharge during the sixteen

years. Al but a handful of the other 750 were ordered to pay

nominal nes coupled with huge fees. A total of 124 of those new

convicts, fewer than 17 percent, were able to pay their judgments.

Ben Holt, convicted of vagrancy on August 29, 1906, was ordered

to pay the county a ne of $1. The costs of his arrest and

prosecution, however, totaled $76.28. Instead of paying, he

confessed judgment with a white farmer named James Wharton,

who paid the ne and fees and in return owned Holt for a

minimum of two hundred days.9

Of the remaining six hundred men, convicted of pet y crimes and

unable to pay what the courts demanded of them, almost ve

hundred were bartered into forced labor. More than two dozen

convicts were leased to other industrial concerns, eight each to the

Sloss mines and Alabama Manufacturing Co. Eight more were

acquired by two sawmil companies, Walter Brothers, in Sprague,

Alabama, and Henderson-Boyd Lumber Co., in Richburg,

Alabama.10

Among the leadership circles of a place such as Shelby County,

the casual acquisition of blacks through the now careful y

choreographed ritual at the courthouse became a routine perk of

modest influence.

Arrested for petit larceny in May of 1905, Jim Goodson was ned

$25. To avoid being sent to the mines with other county convicts,

he agreed to sign a contract for labor with Robert E. Bowden to

work 236 days "in his rock quarry" Bowden bridged two groups

common in southern towns—as both an important local

entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful