By Douglas A. Blackmon
On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at
the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous
seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.
The sender was a barely literate African-American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With
little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction
of her 14-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into
involuntary servitude.
Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful White people in her world. She
knew where her brother had been taken-a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou.
There, hundreds of Black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in
the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the
wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No White official in this corner of the
state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a Black teenager.
Confronted with a world of indifferent White people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining
thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on
a speech by Roosevelt promising a “square deal” for Black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey
decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States
to help her brother.
“Mr. Prassident,” she wrote. “They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing
for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.”
Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged
outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular
folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference
number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken.
Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.
As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable
is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds
her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence
recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking-as
horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey’s tale. It is the same in the next box
on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the
next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and
grimly bureaucratic responses-altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material-chronicle
cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end
of the Civil War.
“i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me … and i cant get her out,”
wrote Reverend L. R. Farmer, pastor of a Black Baptist church in Morganton, N.C.
“i want ask you is it law for people to whip (col) people and keep them and not
allow them to leave without a pass.”
A farmer near Pine Apple, Ala., named J. R. Adams, writing of terrible abuses by
the dominant landowning family in the county, was one of the astonishingly few
White southerners who also complained to the Department of Justice. “They have held
negroes … for years,” Adams wrote. “It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes.”
A similar body of material rests in the files of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the one institution that undertook any sustained
effort to address at least the most terrible cases. Dwarfing everything at those
repositories are the still largely unexamined collections of local records in courthouses
across the South. In dank basements, abandoned buildings, and local archives, seemingly
endless numbers of files contain hundreds of thousands of handwritten entries documenting
in monotonous granularity the details of an immense, metastasizing horror that stretched
well into the twentieth century.
By the first years after 1900, tens of thousands of African-American men and boys,
along with a smaller number of women, had been sold by southern state governments.
An exponentially larger number, of whom surviving records are painfully incomplete,
had been forced into labor through county and local courts, backwoods justices of
the peace, and outright kidnapping and trafficking. The total number of those re-enslaved
in the seventy-five years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of
World War II can’t be precisely determined, but based on the records that do survive,
we can safely say it happened to hundreds of thousands. How many more African- Americans
circumscribed their lives in dramatic ways, or abandoned all to flee the South entirely,
to avoid that fate or mob violence? It is impossible to know. Millions. Generations.
This is not an easy story for Americans to receive, much less accept. The idea that
not just civil rights but basic freedom itself was denied to an enormous population
of African-Americans until the middle of the twentieth century fits nowhere in the
triumphalist, steady-progress, greatest-generations accounts we prefer for our national
narrative. That the thrilling events depicted in Steven Spielberg’s recent film
Lincoln-the heroic, frenzied campaign by Abraham Lincoln leading to passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery-were in fact later trumped not just by discrimination
and segregation but by the resurrection of a full-blown derivative of slavery itself.
This story of re-enslavement is irrefutably true, however. Indeed, even as Spielberg’s
film conveys the euphoria felt by African-Americans and all opposed to slavery upon
passage of the amendment in 1865, it also unintentionally foreshadows the demise
of that brighter future. On the night of the amendment’s passage in the film, the
African American housekeeper and, as presented in the film, secret lover of the
abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, played by the actress S. Epatha Merkerson,
reads the amendment aloud. First, the sweeping banishment of slavery. And then,
an often overlooked but powerful prepositional phrase: “except as a punishment for
crime.”
It began with Reconstruction. Faced with empty government coffers, a paralyzing
intellectual inability to contemplate equitable labor arrangements with former chattel,
profound resentment against the emancipated freedmen, and a desperate economic need
to force Black workers back into the fields, White landowners and government officials
began using the South’s criminal courts to compel African Americans back into slavery.
In the first years after the Civil War, even as former slaves optimistically swarmed
into new schools and lined up at courthouses at every whisper of a hope of economic
independence, the Southern states began enacting an array of interlocking laws that
would make all African-Americans criminals, regardless of their conduct, and thereby
making it legal to force them into chain gangs, labor camps, and other forms of
involuntarily servitude. By the end of 1865, every Southern state except Arkansas
and Tennessee had passed laws outlawing vagrancy and defining it so vaguely that
virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a White man could be arrested
for the crime. An 1865 Mississippi statute required Black workers to enter into
labor contracts with White farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest. Four
other states legislated that African Americans could not legally be hired for work
without a discharge paper from their previous employer-effectively preventing them
from leaving the plantation of the White man they worked for.
After the return of nearly complete White political control in 1877, the passage
of those laws accelerated. Some, particularly those that explicitly said they applied
only to African-Americans, were struck down in court appeals or through federal
interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures on Black life quickly
replaced them. Most of the new laws were written as if they applied to everyone,
but in reality they were overwhelmingly enforced only against African- Americans.
In the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida passed laws making it a crime
for a Black man to change employers without permission. It was a crime for a Black
man to speak loudly in the company of a White woman, a crime to have a gun in his
pocket, and a crime to sell the proceeds of his farm to anyone other than the man
he rented land from. It was a crime to walk beside a railroad line, a crime to fail
to yield a sidewalk to White people, a crime to sit among Whites on a train, and
it was most certainly a crime to engage in sexual relations with-or, God forbid,
to show true love and affection for-a White girl.
And that’s how it happened. Within a few years of the passage of these laws, tens
of thousands of Black men and boys, and a smaller number of Black women, were being
arrested and sold into forced labor camps by state officials, local judges, and
sheriffs. During this time, some actual criminals were sold into slavery, and a
small percentage of them were White. But the vast majority were Black men accused
of trivial or trumped-up crimes. Compelling evidence indicates that huge numbers
had in fact committed no offense whatsoever. As the system grew, countless White
farmers and businessmen jostled to “lease” as many Black “criminals” as they could.
Soon, huge numbers of other African-Americans were simply being kidnapped and sold
into slavery.
The forced labor camps they found themselves in were islands of squalor and brutality.
Thousands died of disease, malnourishment, and abuse. Mortality rates in some years
exceeded 40 percent. At the same time, this new slavery trade generated millions
of dollars for state and local governments-for many years it was the single largest
source of income for the state of Alabama. As these laws and practices expanded
across the South, they became the primary means to terrorize African- Americans,
and to coerce them into going along with other exploitative labor arrangements,
like sharecropping, that are more familiar to twenty-first-century Americans.
This was the terrifying trap into which Carrie Kinsey’s young brother had been drawn.
After a trip through the counties near Kinsey’s home, W. E. B. Du Bois, who was
then teaching at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, described in 1905 one such convict
farm. “It is a depressing place-bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association,
only a memory of forced human toil-now, then, and before the war,” he wrote. He
described Black farmworkers who never saw wages because charges for rent and food
always exceeded any compensation. “A dismal place it still remains, with rows of
ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants,” Du Bois wrote. “And now and then
it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.”
Du Bois could easily have been describing Kinderlou, where Kinsey’s brother was
taken. Encompassing 22,000 acres, it was an enterprise that dwarfed any antebellum
definition of the word “plantation.” Owned by state Representative Edward McRee
and his brothers, Kinderlou was an unparalleled center of economic and political
power in Georgia. By 1900, the siblings had inherited the enterprise from their
father, a noted Confederate officer named George McRee. Each lived in a lavish
mansion within a square mile of the center of the plantation, basking in the subtropical
warmth of the Gulf Coast.
Between them, an empire bustled with enslaved laborers. Consuming the bulk of an
entire county, Kinderlou included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy loam,
and thousands more of dense pine and hardwood. On a private spur of the Atlantic
Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens of boxcars
waited at all times for the hundreds of thousands of bushels of tomatoes, watermelons,
cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and cotton. The McRees owned their own cotton gins,
compresses to make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A
five-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation’s sugarcane to make syrup. Five
80-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco, and a factory produced thousands
of pallets, wooden crates, and baskets for shipping produce. Deep in the forests,
McRee turpentine camps collected rosin for their naval stores distillery.
Initially, the McRees hired only free Black labor, but beginning in the 1890s they
routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from the state of Georgia to perform
the grueling work of clearing land, removing stumps, ditching fields, and constructing
roads. Other prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over the course of fifteen
years, thousands of men and women were forced to Kinderlou and held in stockades
under the watch of armed guards. After the turn of the century, the brothers began
to arrange for even more forced laborers through the sheriffs of nearby counties
in Georgia and Florida-fueling what eventually grew into a sprawling traffic in
humans.
A Black worker in 1904 described to a journalist how he arrived at the farm at age
10 as a free laborer. A few years later, he attempted to leave to work at another
plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure, one of the McRees and “some
kind of law officer” tracked him down. The new employer apologized to the McRees
for hiring the young worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known
“this nigger was bound out to you.”
“So I was carried back to the Captain’s,” the man said later. “That night he made
me strip off my clothing down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard,
ordered his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my bare back,
and stood by until it was done.”
When his labor contract finally expired after a decade, the man was told he could
leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his accumulated debt at the plantation
commissary-$165, the rough equivalent of two years’ labor for a free farmer. Unable
to do so, of course, he was compelled to sign a contract promising to work on the
farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict.
He and other “prison laborers” slept each night in the same clothes they wore in
the fields, on rotting mattresses infested with pests. Many were chained to their
beds. Food was crude and minimal. The disobedient were tied to a log lying on their
backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank of wood. After a slave
was untied, if he could not return to work on his blistered feet, he was strapped
to the log again, this time facedown, and lashed with a leather whip. Women prisoners
were held across a barrel and whipped on their bare bottoms.
In the summer of 1903, the assistant U.S. attorney in Macon, Georgia, began a brief
investigation into Kinderlou’s army of Black laborers held against their will. He
discovered that the brothers had arrangements with sheriffs and other officers in
at least six other Georgia counties. These law enforcement officials would seize
Blacks on the grounds that they were “committing crimes,” often specious and sometimes
altogether made up, and then sell them to the McRees and other businessmen, without
ever going through the regular processes of the criminal courts. When the McRees
learned of the investigation, they hastily freed the workers being held involuntarily.
At least forty fled immediately.
James Robinson, the brother of Carrie Kinsey, may have been one of them, though
federal officials never connected her allegations to the Kinderlou investigation.
Even if Kinsey’s brother’s case had been investigated, her letter misspelled the
name of the plantation.
In November 1903, a grand jury indicted the McRee brothers on 13 specific counts
of holding African-American men and women illegally. Many of those enslaved had
never been charged or tried in any fashion. Several public officials were indicted
for conspiring to buy and sell Blacks arrested on trivial or fabricated charges
and then turning them over to the McRees. Sheriff Thomas J. McClellan, resorting
to an audacious legal defense employed repeatedly in the handful of slavery cases
brought by federal officials in the early twentieth century, argued that since no
federal law specifically made slavery a crime, he could not be guilty of violating
it. In effect, he claimed slavery was not illegal in the United States.
A member of the U.S. Congress submitted a legal brief in support of the sheriff,
and prominent state officials sat at the defendants’ table during a hearing on
a challenge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators of lumber camps, where thousands
of other men were being held under similarly dubious circumstances, watched the
proceedings closely. Appearing with his brothers before a Savannah courtroom, Edward
McRee assured the judge that while his family had held many African Americans in
the four decades since slavery’s abolition, they had never intended to enslave
anyone or break the law. “Though we are probably technically guilty we did not know
it,” he told the court. “This custom has been [in] existence ever since the war….
We never knew that we were doing anything wrong.”
The judge, hoping to avoid inflaming the anger of local whites, dispensed symbolic
punishments. The McRees were allowed to plead guilty and pay a token fine of $1,000.
In the wake of that trial and other failed prosecutions in the first years of the
century, the U.S. Department of Justice turned a blind eye to such practices for
the next 40 years. Only the advent of World War II, a declining need for low-skill
laborers, and a new era of federal prosecution would finally bring a true end to
American slavery.
More than 100 years after Carrie wrote her letter, I received an unexpected call
from a man who identified himself as Bernard Kinsey. He believed he was one of
Carrie’s cousins.
Her letter had haunted me through years of research for the book I wrote on re-enslavement.
What those few lines conveyed-the seizure of a teenage boy and his sale to a powerful
businessman, the abject refusal of authorities to assist her, the brutalization
of thousands of other Blacks on the same plantation, the heroism of Carrie in seeking
the aid of President Roosevelt, and, finally, the futility of her letter-captured
the entire epic tragedy of Black life in the rural South in the time between the
Civil War and World War II. Even to this day, I find myself turning back to her
story, resifting census records and cemetery records, looking for the fate of her
brother. Did he escape? Did he die at Kinderlou? The answer still eludes me.
Bernard Kinsey represented the counter story. He told me that the Kinsey family
fled to Florida not long after the McRee trial of 1903. Bernard’s father opened
one grocery store. Then more. Bernard graduated from Florida A&M University in 1967,
and a few years later he became one of the first Black employees of Xerox Corp.
Twenty years later, he retired as a senior executive, one of more than 10,000 African
Americans at the company. He then became a major civic leader in Los Angeles, a
successful entrepreneur and philanthropist, and one of the leading collectors of
African- American art and artifacts in the U.S.
Here was the valiance of African-Americans who persevered against immeasurable odds.
Here was the miracle that American society survived its sweeping betrayal of its
own values, its collective dishonoring and debasement of Lincoln’s achievement,
the euphoric crowds of 1865 and all those who had died in the Civil War. Ultimately,
it is only in a full revelation of all three narratives-of Lincoln and the Thirteenth
Amendment, of re-enslavement and the failure of American character, and of the slow
ongoing resurrection of our values through the struggle of citizens such as Bernard
Kinsey-that we can begin to understand the progress we have made, and the progress
we have yet to achieve.
A few weeks after the publication of my book, the great-great-granddaughter of a
White industrialist and enslaver of thousands in Atlanta wrote me to describe her
pain at discovering a personal connection to these events-and the importance of
not looking away from them.
“We did not know of any of this before,” she wrote. “But I believe that the ghosts
of slavery and racism and the terrorism inflicted within our own country must not
be hidden away but brought out into the open…. Without the whole truth, we live
only in illusions.”
Douglas A. Blackmon is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Slavery by Another
Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
He teaches at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and is a contributing
editor at the Washington Post. This article, the first of an 11-part series on race,
is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the
Washington Monthly Magazine.
