Profiles in Character #18: The Struggle for Justice of Warren Reese, Jr.

In the spring of 1903, 37-year-old Warren Reese, Jr., the federal prosecutor in Montgomery, Alabama, was directed by Attorney General Philander C. Knox to investigate allegations of a potentially widespread practice of forcing African American men (and some women) back into slavery.  Thirty-eight years after the 13th Amendment, evidence was accumulating of a peonage system in several Southern states.

The typical practice was comprehensively chronicled in Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name.  Men (numbering in the thousands) would be arrested on a trumped up charge, found guilty and fined.  Since they were too poor to pay, a white man would offer to do so in exchange for the “guilty” man signing a labor contract to work to pay off the fine.  The men were then sold to local businessmen who operated mines, farms, lumber camps, cotton plantations or road gangs.  They were held by force under abhorrent living conditions and frequently whipped. New costs were added to their debt to keep them imprisoned for years.  They were hunted by dogs if they tried to escape and many died from mistreatment.

Reese was the son of a Confederate colonel and grandson of a lawyer who helped form the Confederate government.  Yet he served under Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who had promised better treatment for African Americans, whose rights were under siege since the end of Reconstruction.

By April, nine white men had been indicted; dozens more would follow.  The prospect of finding them guilty of slavery affronted the assumed racial superiority of white Southerners, denied their flagrant insistence that African Americans were well-treated and threatened the livelihood of powerful citizens.

Appalled by evidence he uncovered, Reese pressed forward in a hostile atmosphere. He had the support of U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Jones but clearly not the guilty, who included local magistrates, law enforcement officials, and hundreds of enslavers, their lawyers and even the Alabama Secretary of State Thomas Heflin.  In June, Jones ruled that, if the charges were proved. the indicted men had violated peonage laws as well as the pre-emancipation slave kidnapping act and that the state’s labor contract law which bound the workers was unconstitutional. 

Reese wrote that this amounted to “an actual and not a theoretical emancipation of the negro, and it is now necessary that this office make an effort to rescue these people.”  He pressed for backing from Washington, and a wider investigation was launched throughout much of the South.

The rest would be neither easy nor just.  Anger at indictments and trials intensified.  White Southerners demanded that no white men should ever be convicted.  Many in the North and Washington grew tired of the issue.  At their trials, the accused insisted their captives had been properly convicted, had agreed to pay off their debts with labor and were treated well.  At the same time, they intimidated witnesses forcing Reese to arrange for safely housing them under federal guard.  Defense lawyers, including for the notorious James Turner (one of a trio that enslaved 80 men), insisted the indicted men had committed no crime since no federal law had ever made slavery illegal.

Turner’s jury was deadlocked even after Judge Jones told them “If you do not return a verdict of guilty you will perjure yourself in the sight of God and dishonor yourselves in the eyes of men.”  Jones had to declare a mistrial and Turner was free.  Shockingly, he showed up the next Monday to plead guilty.  Judge Jones accepted the plea and fined him just $1,000.

No doubt crestfallen, Reese vowed to continue.  Judge Jones, however, had had enough.  More and more defendants pled guilty to just get fined, a grave injustice for African Americans so desperately in need of justice.  Reese even learned that John Pace, who he had successfully prosecuted, was still enslaving African Americans.

Reese made a last ditch effort to file habeas corpus petitions to free thousands of African Americans held in this new form of slavery, writing to U.S. Attorney General Moody in March 1905:

“ I am perfectly willing to shoulder the responsibility and commence these proceedings . .  I am willing to jeopardize . . . my relationship with all the nine congressmen and the two Senators from the District, the local bar, the Bench and the people of the city of Montgomery, where I was born and raised.”

Moody would not agree.  The U.S. Supreme Court would eventually overturn a lower court’s ruling against the peonage system, John Pace would be pardoned by Roosevelt, and Turner would be elected to a seat in the Alabama House. 

In January 1906, Reese left his position.  Yet his determination to seek justice did not end.  After serving as a major in World War I, Reese went on to become a special attorney for the federal government and successfully prosecuted the first peonage cases in Alabama after the Supreme Court had ruled in 1911 (Bailey vs. Alabama) that the state’s peonage law was, in fact, unconstitutional.

Photo Credit: Alabama Department of History and Archives