Slavery by Another Name, Part Two: Harvest of an Unfinished War

Part Two of Three

Source note: This series summarizes the uploaded SuperSummary guide to Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. It follows the guide’s presentation and should be read as a summary rather than independent archival verification.

Content note: This article discusses racial violence, forced labor, whipping, sexual exploitation, lynching, and other abuses described in the source.

Previous article: Part One: The Slow Poison

John Davis and the Slave Farm of John Pace

Part Two moves from the broad structure of convict leasing to a concrete example: the forced-labor operation run by Alabama farmer John Pace. The guide opens this section with John Davis, a Black man traveling to see his family in 1901. After a confrontation in Goodwater, Alabama, Davis was arrested by local law enforcement, brought before a justice of the peace, and saddled with an alleged debt.

Pace paid the debt and obtained Davis’s labor. Davis was made to sign a contract requiring months of work, confinement at night, and submission to Pace’s authority. Because Davis could not meaningfully understand or resist the arrangement, the contract functioned as a legal disguise for coercion.

Pace was not alone. Local officials, farmers, and businessmen formed a market in Black labor. The guide describes people being sold, resold, whipped, hunted after escape attempts, and forced to remain beyond their original terms through new accusations or invented debts. Black women were also subjected to sexual exploitation.

A Local System, Not Isolated Misconduct

The importance of the Pace story is that it reveals an organized structure rather than one abusive employer. Judges issued convictions. Constables and sheriffs supplied prisoners. Farmers bought labor. County contracts formalized the process. Census records sometimes described coerced workers as servants because slavery was no longer a legal category.

Blackmon argues that the new system widened access to the profits of slavery. Men who had never owned slaves before the Civil War could now obtain Black forced labor through courts and debt arrangements. Re-enslavement became available not only to an old planter elite but to a broader class of white landowners and businessmen.

Theodore Roosevelt and a Federal Challenge

In 1903, the federal government began investigating reports that people in Alabama and Georgia were being held in peonage and involuntary servitude. President Theodore Roosevelt was concerned that the country had failed to deliver meaningful freedom to Black citizens, though the guide also describes his views as paternalistic and racially hierarchical.

Roosevelt consulted Booker T. Washington, who advised him on Southern appointments. Washington recommended Thomas Goode Jones for a federal judgeship in Alabama. Jones supported constitutional citizenship for Black Americans more strongly than many Southern officials, making him a key figure when the slavery cases reached federal court.

Attorney General Philander C. Knox directed federal prosecutor Warren S. Reese Jr. to investigate. Reese discovered that the allegations extended far beyond a few rogue farms. Evidence pointed toward a broad system operating through multiple counties, officials, plantations, mines, and labor camps.

The Grand Jury and the 1903 Indictments

A federal grand jury heard testimony from people who had been forced into labor. Witnesses described false arrests, fabricated debts, beatings, confinement, and the financial relationships between local officials and employers.

John Pace and other defendants denied wrongdoing, minimized the violence, or claimed that the workers were free. Some began releasing laborers after learning of the federal investigation, which the guide presents as an effort to eliminate evidence. Witnesses faced intimidation, and Southern political leaders and newspapers often defended the accused men or portrayed federal investigators as hostile outsiders.

Judge Jones ruled that forced debt contracts could constitute peonage and that fabricated criminal charges used to seize labor could violate federal law. He also questioned Alabama labor-contract practices. Yet his rulings contained an important weakness: he believed that arrangements approved through a formal local court could be lawful. That legal opening would later allow the system to continue under more carefully documented procedures.

The Summer of Trials

The 1903 trials revealed how difficult it was to punish white defendants for enslaving Black people. Pace pleaded guilty and initially received a serious sentence, but remained free during appeal. Other defendants received short sentences or fines. Juries resisted conviction even when Black witnesses described severe abuse.

James Fletcher Turner’s case exposed the legal absurdity surrounding slavery after emancipation. His lawyers argued that even if involuntary servitude had occurred, the federal statutes did not clearly punish slavery itself unless the facts fit the narrower definition of peonage. The guide emphasizes that this was not merely rhetorical: federal law contained real gaps that defendants could exploit.

When jurors deadlocked, Judge Jones expressed deep disappointment. Yet he continued to favor symbolic punishment over long imprisonment, hoping public shame would discourage future abuses without provoking a broader white backlash.

Racial Backlash and a Climate of Terror

Federal enforcement unfolded during a period of intense racial violence. White supremacist politicians portrayed the prosecutions as an attack on Southern society. Black witnesses and their supporters faced threats. Mobs targeted Black communities, and even white officials who protected Black prisoners from lynching could become targets.

Blackmon connects this violence to a larger culture of racial mythology. The guide discusses how religion, pseudo-scientific racism, eugenics, newspapers, popular fiction, and political rhetoric all reinforced the idea that Black Americans were naturally inferior or dangerous.

Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novels, especially The Clansman, helped romanticize the Ku Klux Klan and portray white supremacy as heroic. The popularity of this material showed how cultural propaganda could normalize the same racial order that made forced labor possible.

Symbolic Punishments and Federal Retreat

Warren Reese wanted the federal government to continue pursuing slavery cases. Judge Jones, however, became increasingly reluctant as public opposition intensified. Defendants who admitted guilt often received fines rather than prison terms. President Roosevelt later pardoned some of those convicted.

Similar prosecutions in Georgia produced the same pattern: investigations uncovered serious abuse, but courts often imposed symbolic penalties. Federal officials also grew overwhelmed by the number of complaints. The guide describes a government that had opened the door to enforcement but lacked the political will to walk through it fully.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Evidence the Government Ignored

W. E. B. Du Bois conducted a major sociological investigation of Black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama, an area federal officials considered deeply implicated in forced labor. His team surveyed thousands of people and documented a society in which nominally free Black workers remained dependent on white landowners, debt, and coercive labor arrangements.

The Department of Labor declined to publish Du Bois’s study, judging it too politically sensitive. Du Bois later transformed aspects of the research into fiction. The guide uses this episode to show that evidence existed, but government institutions could choose not to give it public force.

The Courts Close the Door Again

Federal legal victories did not hold. The Supreme Court overturned a ruling that had threatened Georgia’s convict-leasing practices, reasserting state control. Reese, frustrated by the collapse of his work, left federal service. Roosevelt pardoned John Pace. James Fletcher Turner went on to public office.

What had briefly looked like a national reckoning instead demonstrated the limits of reform. Blackmon’s broader point is that rights mean little when the institutions responsible for enforcing them refuse to act consistently.

The “New South” Rises on Forced Labor

Part Two ends by returning to Alabama’s expanding industrial economy. Counties continued arresting Black men at extraordinarily high rates and selling their labor to mines, ironworks, lumber companies, and private employers.

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad became one of the largest recipients of forced convict labor. Its cheaply produced coal and iron fed the region’s industrial expansion. Forced labor also protected the company from strikes by free workers. When U.S. Steel acquired TCI, the system did not immediately disappear; additional convict laborers were sent to the Pratt Mines.

This brings the story back toward Green Cottenham. The economic and legal machinery described in Parts One and Two had become mature, profitable, and deeply embedded. Green would soon be caught inside it.

Biographical Profiles

John Pace

John Pace was an Alabama farmer who obtained Black laborers by paying fines or alleged debts and forcing them to work. The guide portrays his farm as notorious for whippings, torture, confinement, and fraudulent extensions of labor terms. He was prosecuted but escaped lasting punishment and continued using forced labor.

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was president when the federal government began a significant investigation into Southern peonage and forced labor. The guide credits him with opening the door to enforcement while also emphasizing his paternalistic racism and his administration’s eventual retreat when the scale of the problem became politically difficult.

Booker T. Washington

Washington was born into slavery and later became one of the most influential Black leaders in the United States. He promoted industrial and vocational education through Tuskegee Institute and favored a gradual strategy of self-improvement within the realities of segregation. His relationship with Roosevelt gave him influence in federal appointments.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Du Bois was a scholar, writer, and Black political leader who rejected accommodation to second-class citizenship. His research into Southern Black labor documented the economic structures behind racial inequality. The guide presents his suppressed Lowndes County study as evidence that the federal government often possessed information it chose not to act upon.

Thomas Goode Jones

Jones was a federal judge in Alabama appointed by Roosevelt after Washington recommended him. He supported constitutional citizenship for Black Americans more than many Southern officials, but he consistently preferred fines and symbolic punishment to severe prison sentences. His legal reasoning both challenged and unintentionally preserved parts of the forced-labor system.

Why Part Two Matters

Part Two demonstrates that exposure alone was not enough. Federal investigators found evidence. Victims testified. Grand juries indicted defendants. Judges acknowledged that forced labor existed. Yet racial solidarity, legal loopholes, witness intimidation, weak sentencing, presidential pardons, Supreme Court rulings, and political fatigue prevented a decisive break with neo-slavery.

The result was not the disappearance of forced labor but its survival and expansion. Part Three follows Green Cottenham into the Pratt Mines and traces how convict leasing evolved through the early twentieth century before federal policy finally changed.

Continue the series: Part Three: The Final Chapter of Slavery