Slavery by Another Name (20 page)

passageways back to the bot om of the main shaft, where the cars

were consolidated into larger wagons. There, a mechanized hoist,

powered by a steam engine on the surface, hauled the wagons out

powered by a steam engine on the surface, hauled the wagons out

into daylight.

The coal was pul ed to the "tipple," a huge wooden structure atop

a railroad trestle, and tipped. The coal was dumped into much

larger railroad cars waiting below. A steam locomotive hauled the

trainload from there to one of several nearby sites where the

company operated more than eight hundred ovens to produce the

dense-carbon coke used as fuel by the growing number of steel and

iron furnaces in and around Birmingham. In addition to nearly one

thousand forced prison laborers regularly on hand, the company

soon employed another two thousand free miners, the majority of

whom were also black, many of them former convicts.14

Forced laborers were priced depending on their health and their

ability to dig coal. Under state rules, a " rst-class" prisoner had to

cut and load into mine cars four tons of coal a day to avoid being

whipped. The weakest inmates, labeled "fourth-class" or "dead

hands," were required to produce at least one ton a day. A rst-class

state convict cost a company $18.50 a month, according to a convict

board nancial report. A dead hand cost $9. The leasing of convicts

soon was generating in excess of $120,000 a year for the state of

Alabama, an extraordinary sum for a state whose total general tax

revenue—and budget—at the time barely exceeded $1 mil ion.

To boosters of southern industry, the rapidly expanding

operations at Prat Mines were the ful l ment of a once impossible

fantasy. The success not only de ed caricatures of the slumbering

rural South, but actively chal enged a citadel of northern capitalism.

"Nothing has ever been done in the South that looks so much like

being a real competitor of Pennsylvania in the iron business,"

boasted the Nashvil e Union.15

In 1889, the Prat Mines moved their prisoners into new barracks

in the company's wooden stockade at the Shaft No. 1 mine. In a

report to the governor, mine inspectors said the prison, designed to

hold 480 men, was "as neat and clean as …the best regulated

hotels" and that "the drinking water is ltered and in warm weather

is cooled with ice."16 A second prison was opened at Slope No. 2

is cooled with ice." A second prison was opened at Slope No. 2

later in 1889, nearly doubling the number of convicts the company

could house. The company claimed to have spent $60,000 building

the structures and surrounding compound.

For the men beneath the surface, the view was very di erent. Prat

Mines was a scene of nightmarish human su ering and brutal

retaliation. Subjected to squalid living conditions, poor medical

treatment, scant food, and frequent oggings, hundreds died—the

victims of mine explosions, rock fal s, res, neglect, and, most

commonly, recurring outbreaks of disease. Many more left the

mines and work camps alive but physical y shat ered. If unclaimed

by relatives, those who died were quickly interred in crude burial

places adjacent to the prison camps or incinerated in one of the

company's coke ovens.

In hushed tones, survivors recounted to friends and relatives how

slave miners labored under ghastly conditions, working in pools of

putrid water that seeped out of the rock or leaked from equipment

used to soften the coal. The seepage was contaminated by mineral

residues and the prisoners’ own body waste, but was often the only

water available to drink. The contaminated seepage frequently

triggered waves of dysentery, a painful malady caused by drinking

water contaminated with human waste. Dysentery causes

in ammation of the large intestines, terrible stomach pains, and

uncontrol able diarrhea that leads to severe dehydration and,

ultimately for many, death. Dozens died each year during epidemics

of diarrhea and intestinal sickness that swept through the mines

with grim regularity, according to death registries maintained at

some mines. Gas from the miners’ headlamps and smoke from

blasts of dynamite and gunpowder choked the air. Deadly methane,

which occurs natural y in seams of coal, accumulated in poorly

ventilated sections of mines. An 1890 convict inspector described

"more sickness" at the Prat Mines "than any other place."17

An unintended distinction between antebel um slavery and the

new forced labor system became increasingly clear—and disastrous

new forced labor system became increasingly clear—and disastrous

for the men captured into it. Slaves of the earlier era were at least

minimal y insulated from physical harm by their intrinsic nancial

value. Their owners could borrow money with slaves as col ateral,

pay debts with them, sel them at a pro t, or extend the investment

through production of more slave children. But the convicts of the

new system were of value only as long as their sentences or

physical strength lasted. If they died while in custody, there was no

nancial penalty to the company leasing them. Another black

laborer would always be available from the state or a sheri . There

was no compel ing reason not to tax these convicts to their absolute

physiological limits.

The private guards who sta ed the slave labor mines and camps

were vulgar, untrained, and often inebriated. Placed under the

complete control of the companies and businessmen who acquired

them, the laborers su ered intense physical abuse and the

deprivation of food, clothing, medical care, and other basic human

needs. Guards, rarely supervised, hung men by their thumbs or

ankles as punishment. Convict slaves were whipped for failure to

work at the rate demanded by their overseers, commonly receiving

as many as sixty or seventy lashes at a time. Accounts of men or

women lashed until skin literal y fel from their backs were not

uncommon. Convicts who at empted repeated escapes were subject

to many of the same torturous restraints as their slave forebears—

shackles, bal s and chains, or objects riveted to iron cu s or col ars

to limit their mobility. A convict recaptured after escaping a labor

camp in Muscogee County, Georgia, had a steel ring placed around

his neck to which "was xed a spike, curling inward, so that rapid

running was impossible."18

Underfed and overworked convicts traveled from the Prat Mines

stockade to the mine through an underground manway before dawn

each day, and back through the same tunnel after dark. Only on

Sundays, when mining ceased for a day, would the prisoners see

sunlight. An 1889 report by Alabama legislators reported an

"immense amount of whipping" of inmates at Prat and other prison

mines.

mines.

During 1888 and 1889, seven of the black laborers forced into the

Slope No. 2 mine were children under the age of ten. Prison

inspection reports indicated that among nearly 1,100 men brought

there, only one third could read. Fewer than forty had prior

criminal records. Of the 116 prisoners who died, a large number

were teenagers.

The o cial registry of casualties listed the death of twelve-year-

old Arthur Easter in March 1888 for unknown reasons. Fifteen-year-

old George Wolfork, a waiter before being seized into the prison,

died in May 1888 of typhoid after rst being stabbed in the arm.

Malachi Coleman, a sixteen-year-old trained as a bricklayer, serving

a four-month term, died in May after having his "leg mashed."

Luther Metcalf, sixteen years old, died of unknown causes in

October. John Cot on expired in November, six weeks after arrival.

The cause of death was listed as "arm o below shoulder." Other

common causes of death from just one page of the registry

included: "yel ow fever; abscess lower jaw; shot in neck; shot in

shoulder and finger; right eye out; skul fractured."19

Volatile mixtures of fumes or combinations of "afterdamp"—air

with dangerously elevated levels of carbon monoxide and other

gases—and coal dust col ected in the poorly ventilated shafts,

sometimes igniting to cause huge explosions. Gas ignited in Shaft

No. 1, kil ing eleven men in one 1891 incident, al but one of

whom were forced workers. At other times, gas did not explode but

began burning as it passed out of the coal—igniting the seam itself

and turning the mine passage into a tunnel of literal y aming

rock.20 Some res could only be extinguished by ooding the mine

shafts entirely.

Under such execrable conditions, prisoners at empted

increasingly brazen escapes, with almost monthly frequency. More

than once, convicts themselves at empted to set re to the mine in

hopes of breaking free during the ensuing melee. Invariably,

escapees or others died in the plots. The company reported one

such breakout in May of 1890, claiming that three white prisoners

such breakout in May of 1890, claiming that three white prisoners

and one black convict staged a re alarm in the middle of the night.

"In the terror and confusion, while the of icers were trying to restore

quiet," the four broke free of the stockade, guards said. One

prisoner remained free for some time; a second was mortal y shot.

Two others— Bob Crawford and Noah Marks—were immediately

recaptured, most likely by the prison's bloodhounds.21

In the meantime, the pent-up hostilities of the stockade erupted

into riot. "It became necessary for us to adopt some prompt and

severe measures to reduce the insubordinates to subjection. But

everything was set led in a short time," read the company report. It

is not di cult to imagine what those measures were. Mine o cials

said Crawford, a white man from outside the South, "commit ed

suicide on the day afterwards."22

Conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg slave camp were even

worse than at the Prat Mines. Several hundred prisoners purchased

from judges and sheri s in twenty-three Alabama counties—

including the Cot ingham homeplace of Bibb—had been acquired

along with the purchase of the mines. In 1889, an epidemic of

measles and dysentery swept through the men.

"The sickness hung on as if loathe to give up its hold upon this

unfortunate place," wrote one state inspector. He cal ed the place

"disastrous." Of 648 forced laborers at the mine in 1888 and 1889,

34 percent did not survive. At the Prat Mines, 18 percent died. Al

but a handful were black.23 Another visitor in the same period

wrote the Alabama governor that every slave worker who had been

in the mine for at least six months had contracted dysentery. He

cal ed the death rate "enormous, frightful, astonishing."24

Convicts in Sloss-She eld's prison compound reached the mine

b y shu ing through a long, low-ceilinged shaft extending from

inside the wal s of their prison compound.25 A special commit ee

of the Alabama legislature studying the convict system in 1889

reported that "many convicts in the coal mines …have not seen the

sun shine for months." In the rst two weeks of June of that year,

sun shine for months." In the rst two weeks of June of that year,

137 floggings were given to the 165 forced laborers at the mine.26

Conditions were so demoralizing at the Coalburg mine, the

convicts so beaten and bedraggled, that laborers did not even

choose to at end church services on Sundays—the one regular

diversion permit ed forced workers. "There are but few of the

convicts that manifest any interest in any kind of religious services,"

wrote Evan Nicholson, a chaplain at the camp in 1890.27

The horror of the mortality rates and living conditions was

underscored by the triviality of the al eged o enses for which

hundreds of men were being held. At the end of the 1880s,

thousands of black men across the South were imprisoned in work

camps only for violations of the new racial codes, completely

subjective crimes, or no demonstrable crime at al . Among the

"felons" sold to the Prat Mines in 1890, seven men were working

for the crime of bigamy, four for homosexuality, and six for

miscegenation—an o ense almost solely prosecuted against black

men who engaged in sex with white women. Many others had been

arrested and sold for ostensible crimes that explicitly targeted

blacks’ assertions of their new civil rights: two for "il egal voting"