Bloody Williamson (17 page)
Authors: Paul M. Angle
As in the Lauder case, Johnson closed for the defense. No one, he asserted, was more keenly aware of the rights of Negroes than he. As a young man he had fought for the abolition of slavery, and as a resident of a one-time slave state he had been bitterly condemned for championing the cause of freedom. But the right of a Negro to equality before the law did not nullify the right of self-defense. On that the defendants stood—that and the fact that the state had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, as the law required.
The final summary of the state’s case fell to George B. Gillespie who, though the youngest of the attorneys for the prosecution, had shown outstanding ability in this and the preceding trial. Governor Johnson’s address, Gillespie admitted, was “as beautiful as a dream and smelled as sweet as new-mown hay,” but facts, not flowery words, should influence juries. The defense claimed self-defense, but against what? If an overt act had been committed, it had been committed by the defendants. The Negroes,
it was said, had formed an unlawful assembly, but they had as much right in Carterville as anyone, and if any assembly was unlawful on September 17, 1899, it was that of the armed whites. The men on trial brought about the death of Sim Cummins: they had the means, the opportunity, the motive, and malice in their hearts. “I make no passionate appeals,” Gillespie concluded. “Decide this case according to the law and facts, and remember God’s decree has gone forth ‘that whosoever shall shed man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ ”
Gillespie finished his argument late in the afternoon of March 3. That evening Judge Vickers gave the case to the jury. At four o’clock on the following morning the jurors reached a verdict of not guilty; three hours later the verdict was announced in open court. State’s Attorney Fowler of Williamson County, recognizing the futility of further prosecutions, asked the court to dismiss the indictments, still pending, for the killing of the other four Negroes. The defendants walked out of the courtroom in full freedom.
As he discharged the prisoners Judge Vickers made a little speech. Let them forget the animosities that had been engendered during the trial, he asked, and cherish neither hatred nor desire for revenge because of it. Above all, he hoped that a spirit of mutual forbearance would prevail, and that peace, law, order, and tranquillity would be restored in Carterville.
The judge’s hope was realized. Nonunion Negroes continued to work the St. Louis and Big Muddy mine without molestation. But for Brush it was a losing venture. Between 1900 and 1905 his production ranged from 213,000 tons to 245,000 tons, as opposed to 320,000 tons in 1897 and 300,000 tons in 1898. At the same time other mines in the state, and even in Williamson County, set new records. Moreover, his expenses ran high. At frequent intervals he had to replenish his labor force, which meant transportation not only for the miners but for their families as well, and at all times he had to keep his properties under heavy guard.
In 1906 he gave up—not by surrendering to the union, but by selling out to the Madison Coal Company. Thereafter the St. Louis and Big Muddy was known as Madison No. 8. And thereafter it was worked by the United Mine Workers of America.
b
Fifty years afterward, one who had known Brush well, both directly and through close family associations, rendered a verdict sounder, perhaps, than those which were read in the courtroom at Vienna. “Sam Brush was no Lester,” he said. “I am sure he fought the union because of principle, not because of money. He was the typical early American stubborn individualist who would not count the cost. He thought he was right.”
*
This is a general description, and may be too bleak for the St. Louis and Big Muddy mine. Miss Elizabeth P. Brush, Samuel T. Brush’s daughter, comments on this passage:
“Occasionally my father took us to the mine to the Fourth of July picnic.… I remember a grove of trees where the long tables were set, and I remember the rows of ugly little houses, but I do not believe there was ‘a total absence of vegetation’; the hideous mountain of slack which I recall so well seeing from the train at Du Quoin must have had a rather inconspicuous counterpart at the Brush mine, for I do not recall it at all.…
“As for sanitary arrangements, running water was a rare luxury in rural southern Illinois in the 1890’s and for many years thereafter. Outdoor privies were all but universal even in the towns. In our house, built on the edge of town (Carbondale) in 1891, and considered ‘modern’ then, all the water used for the bathroom, had to be pumped by hand into a tank in the attic, and so the bathroom was used only in case of illness!”
†
A woman who formerly lived in Williamson County comments: “Some Herrin families
do
keep hired Negro help in their homes overnight. I had a ‘Clarissa’ who lived with me for four years. The old feeling of ‘being out of the city limits by dark’ was still with her, however. She didn’t like to answer my door after the evening meal and usually stayed right in her room. She
never
appeared on the streets after dark.”
‡
Miss Brush comments: “I recall that he thought the Pana operators craven to discard the Negroes after they had used them, and he liked the idea of befriending them (as he thought) as well as of breaking the strike against him.… What his admirers thought courage and optimism, a detached observer might well call rashness or I suppose, foolhardiness.”
That Brush had a deep interest in the welfare of the Negro—most unusual for a southern Illinoisan of fifty years ago—is beyond question. His daughter characterizes him as “a pillar of the Presbyterian Church of Carbondale, a friend of the Negroes of the town, and a stern enemy of the saloon.” And Dean Robert B. Browne of the University of Illinois, who as a young man knew the Brush family well, tells me, in language gratifyingly unacademic: “Sam Brush always had the damnedest stream of colored folks coming to the back door and getting handouts. He took care of ’em.”
§
Miss Brush writes: “Unless my father and my brother James lied repeatedly in their conversations
with each other,
the men who testified thus were most unsavory characters. The account is based on defense testimony, is it not? You quote my father’s statement [see
this page
], but it seems to me you have not allowed it to influence your narrative of the killings. However blameworthy Sam T. Brush may have been for bringing the Negroes into Williamson County, his testimony as to what happened is surely deserving of enough weight to cast a shadow of doubt on what Shadowens and James said to save their skins. And is it likely that the Negroes, who certainly went to Carterville with apprehension, made such threats? It would have been suicidal. As for their drinking, my father thought that story a lie.”
In this comment Miss Brush, professor of history at Rockford College until her retirement in 1950, raises the problem that haunts everyone who tries to describe what happened in the past. In this instance my account is based on defense testimony. That testimony was not discredited at the time, and more than fifty years later it seems credible.
‖
Pronounced Vī-enna.
a
Miss Elizabeth P. Brush makes this comment: “Nothing in your account would so distress my father as the implication that those poor black men took the offensive in any way. Even if Sim Cummins had a gun, and I suppose he had, wasn’t it natural that he should carry it? After the passage of so many years, the truth cannot be discovered. I am afraid that your readers would not realize that.
“The development of our concepts of democracy and social justice makes inevitable an adverse judgment of my father’s attitude toward the union, but I do not believe that that fact should influence our conclusion as to what happened on that dreadful September day. It is, at the very least, conceivable that Sam T. Brush, his son James, his nephew George Colton, his trusted clerk John Maher, all men of unimpeachable integrity, were right when they believed that the slain Negroes were good and sober men innocent of any provocative conduct.”
b
The
Herrin News
for June 15, 1906 carried this story of Brush’s capitulation:
Brush and Colp mines, which for a long time have been non-union mines, will now be manned with union miners. This week they passed into the control of the Madison Coal Company, a New Jersey corporation. The price reported to have been paid for the property is $600,000.
Brush mine has employed negroes mostly and has been non-union. It is reported that when Brush told all of his “niggers” goodbye Monday that it was a pathetic scene.
“Well, Massah Brush, I’se guess we’ve got no job any more now?”
“No,” replied Brush, “not unless you join the union.”
Brush got up and addressed all of his men and was followed by the new manager who told the men that he was going to unionize the mine and that he would pay for the charter himself and that not a man could work at the mines that did not have a union card.
With his gatling gun hauled down from its mounting and his corps of office men Brush made his departure from a place that has in time witnessed a fierce clash between union and non-union labor, but finally witnessing the triumph of organized labor.
MILLIONAIRE VS. UNION
1901–1910
Labor unions at Zeigler or anywhere else can’t put a collar around my neck and give me orders what kind of labor I shall buy with my money.
Joseph Leiter, December 5, 1904.
J
OSEPH
L
EITER
differed from Samuel T. Brush as much as Chicago differs from Carbondale. Where Brush had been orphaned in childhood, and had to depend upon an uncle for a home, Leiter had never known anything but the luxury with which one of Chicago’s most opulent citizens surrounded his family. Where the one had spent short periods in subscription schools, had begun to work at the age of twelve, and had finally managed, years later, to study for one term at Illinois College, the other as a matter of course attended private schools in Chicago, then St. Paul’s, then Harvard. Brush’s first job was that of a newsboy on an Illinois Central train; Leiter started to work as the manager of the family real estate, with a million dollars, his father’s gift, in his own name. While Brush, in the late nineties, was trying to bring his mine out of receivership, Leiter was attempting to corner the wheat market, losing, when he failed, something approaching ten million dollars—a loss that his father and others met.
The two men were as unlike in personality and character as in their circumstances. Brush was small, thin, and facially disfigured;
Leiter, twenty-six years his junior, was tall, heavy, and robust. All his life the older man was a militant opponent of liquor and the saloon; the younger one a steady, and at times a heavy, drinker, and never one to shun other fleshly pleasures.
But Leiter, like Brush, had courage, stubbornness, and an adamant aversion to union labor.
The young Chicago millionaire became a southern Illinois mine operator by way of an experimental coking-plant in his home city. Experiments conducted there in 1900 and 1901 indicated that good coke could be made from Illinois coal, an achievement formerly believed to be impossible. The Leiters, father and son, decided to buy coal land in the southern part of the state, sink a shaft, erect coke ovens, and sell that product instead of the coal itself. Williamson County, zooming into big production, looked like the best prospect, but when young Leiter tried to buy acreage there in 1901 he found that he had come upon the scene too late. Proven coal land, in the amount that he and his father considered essential, was simply not available.
But in Franklin County, immediately north of Williamson, there was not a single mine. Local opinion held that in this region coal existed only in pockets, and that its presence in one place indicated that it would not be found near by. To Joe Leiter this was nonsense. He employed a geologist and put him to work in the southern part of the county. Borings showed that his amateur’s hunch was sound: the Carterville vein extended northward and spread out in a field larger than any yet discovered. He began to buy land.
A severe attack of typhoid pneumonia incapacitated him for much of the year 1902, but upon his recovery he returned to the coalfield and bought land until a solid block of 7,500 acres stood in his father’s name. Half of the tract was woodland, mostly in creek bottoms; the other half was farmland, so wastefully cropped for three quarters of a century as to be practically worthless for agriculture.
Leiter lost no time in developing the property. He chose a site for a shaft in the southwest corner of the county, about five miles north of the Williamson County line, began an extensive system of underground galleries, ordered the most up-to-date cutting and loading machines, and made arrangements with the railroads—none came nearer than six miles—to build into the field. A company town, called Zeigler after the elder Leiter’s middle name, was laid out. The coking plant, with which the venture originated, was given up; the mine would be devoted to low-cost production of coal.
