American History Hit - The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre: Slavery After the Civil War

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

During the spring of 1921, eleven bodies were found in in rural Georgia. These men were victims of horrific murders, and also of a more widespread crime - peonage.Whilst enslavement had legally ended with the surrender at Appomattox and the 13th Amendment, black people across the south were still being entrapped into debt slavery half a century later, in the Twentieth Century.To find out more about this, and about what drove these men's murderer to his crimes, Don speaks to Earl Swift, author of 'Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery.'Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's been a half century since the Civil War surrender, but that doesn't seem to matter much. Here on a beautiful clear day in Atlanta in November 1920.

In this teeming town full of commerce, a man of color must still tread carefully on these streets. Around him are workers, some white, some black, and route to construction jobs, office buildings, restaurants, and the railroad station. White businessmen in bundled coats and fine suits, smoke, chatting among themselves on the sidewalks. Fords and Chrysler's jockey for position with trolley cars and trucks. This man, whose face is lined with worried age and hard fieldwork, searches furtively for an address he's been told on the phone. Checking building numbers and street signs,

he takes subtle measures to not make a scene of himself. He locates a government office, the Bureau of Investigation. He has come to take. tell his story of black men and women like him, being forced to work for no pay in Jackson County, to tell of their entrapment by a boss who paid their petty fines for fabricated crimes, only to confine them on his farm in horrible working and living conditions. The man carries scars from lashes on his back, his most recent failed escape attempt. Gus Chapman is his name, this man who has come to Atlanta.

and the crime of peonage is the story he means to tell, the perpetrator of which will do near anything to avoid the law, even commit murder. Hello, American History Hit listeners, glad you're here. I'm Don Wildman. Today, we enter tough territory not so long ago in America's past. In the early decades of the 20th century, down south in rural Georgia, this is a dark and twisted tale of criminal, murderous behavior on a scale that would be shocking today,

let alone in 1921. And while the violence we will speak of was exceptional in its deviance, it was representative of an insidious, widespread economic racket conceived in effect to prolong the enslavement of free men and women 50 years after the surrender of Southern armies at Appomattox and the passage of constitutional amendments to eradicate it. Can't say enough about it, really, this dismal era of our past. Winning the Civil War was only the first chapter of the undoing of slavery in America

and the epic novel that unfolds over the subsequent century with a cast of remarkable figures who fight back is the historic legacy we possess in our present lives. So let's take a look at this time. In the Company of New York Times best-selling author Earl Swift, who has written a book on the subject, comes out in April this year, and it's entitled, Hell Put to Shame, the 1921 Murder Farm Massacre,

and the horror of America's Second Slavery. Welcome, Earl Swift. Glad to meet you. Don, thanks so much for having me. I've already said it. It is a tragic discussion here we're about to have about murder and mayhem. And we'll get to all that. But I need to first set the scene. There is a practice which your book is about in general that I've referred to, which

must be clearly defined. It's called Peonage. Debt servitude across the South proliferated immediately after the Civil War and was very soon prohibited by federal legislation, the Pianage Act of 1867, enforcement of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, but still this system persisted for decades. How so, Earl? Well, it was a convenient and kind of socially acceptable way to keep black people down, to preserve the asymmetrical relationship that they'd had with, you know, the white majority for generations at that point. And they did it economically. The powers that be looked the other

way as vintage. Debt Surve II took a number of forms in the most. mostly in the South. And it takes a number of different forms, but in the form that I kind of focus on this book, which is pretty common, if you're, say, a young black man in 1921, you're arrested on a trifling charge. Fagrancy was a favorite, which basically means you have no money in your pocket or you have no job and no, you're not immediately going to get one. And you might be tossed into the county workhouse and hit with a $5 fine. And that $5 fine might as well be $5 million dollars because there's no way a black man in 1921 is going to have five dollars to post his bail. So you face a choice.

You can go to the chain gang, which was the fate for an awful lot of people. Or maybe a local farmer would stroll into the jail and offer to pay off your fine if you came and you worked out your sentence on his property. And, you know, that could look pretty attractive. Certainly, you know, when you're facing the chain gang of the prospect of going to a farmer getting three squares a day and doing work that you might be otherwise be doing anyway, it looks pretty good. Once you get on the farm, of course, you realize that there are no protections that you'd

enjoy at the jail, namely, if you're not guaranteed that you're going to be released when you've served your time, that farmer can add the cost of your clothing and food and board to the fine that you owe them so that what started out is a couple months sentence winds up a life sentence, and you really have absolutely no recourse. You can't get out of it. That's the form that it takes in this story. It's not the most common, but it is a very common form of peonage. An impossible cycle of debt, eternal servitude, as you say, virtual slavery. This act that was passed in 1867 was not effective or not enforced. It wasn't even aimed at black people in the South at all. It was intended to stop the spread of peonage from Mexico. It had been. It had been,

taken root there back in the mid-19th century. And in the years after the Civil War, it looked like it was spilling over into the U.S. territories in the southwest. And in fact, in some cases, was being enforced by the U.S. Army. And Congress called wind of it and decided, you know, this is something we need to nip in the bud. So they put together an act passed in 1867 that outlawed punage. But it really lacked teeth in that there was very little enforcement mechanism. And so while practice was illegal, you could do it pretty much with impunity. Sure. And by the time you get to Johnson and all the destruction of reconstruction, that kind of enforcement becomes less and less possible. It reminds me, I mean, right off the bat, I was thinking about sharecropping when I first

approached the story. It's not like that, right? I mean, sharecropping was two-thirds white people in the South, really. It was, but of course, they could fall into the debt cyclos as well. And actually, sharecropping, peonage was often a facet of sharecropping. They're not too distinct things necessarily. When sharecropping works well, when it works the way it was originally conceived, you as a laborer go to work for a landlord, he gives you a plot of land to work, he gives you a place to live, and you produce a crop, and you pay your rent consists of a percentage of that crop. when harvest comes. Now, the way it really worked often was that you went to work for that landlord and you didn't have any food to put on the table until you got paid for your harvest,

until you actually produce the crop. So the landlord would front you money or provisions for the many months that you had to survive to produce that crop. Now, he often is not would inflate the heck out of the prices of those items that he provided to you. Or perhaps, he'd shortchange you on the crop end of it, you know, on what your crop fetched at market. You'd have no way to question him because you're a black man and he's white. And that will get you killed pretty quickly. You know, it's a more subtle form of peonage, but it's every bit as much of a prison sentence. So this is the system in practice, this peonage practice in the early decades stretching into the 20th century.

I mean, it really started in the 19th, but it went right up to 50 years into the 20th century. We're going to be talking about the 1920s here. It is widespread. It's being relied on by all sorts. But in this case, it's a man named John S. Williams, Southern farmer in Jasper County, Georgia, father of 12, 2,000 acre plantation, doing well in life, despite, I suppose, 50 years before being, you know, in the way of Sherman's March. I mean, he's right down there near Alabama. Can you describe this farm and how Pionage worked for Williams? How did these workers and their families live there?

Williams ran a spread in Jasper County, which is about 40 miles. south east of Atlanta. And he did it in two pieces. He had a home place of about 325 acres that he worked himself. And then his oldest sons, or three of his older sons worked a much larger 750 acres spread about five miles away. And the bulk of the laborers that the farm employed were over there on those distant tracks managed by his sons. He had two classes of laborer working for him. He had a couple of families, extended families, who actually, actually lived on the property, had been with him for a long time, 15 years or better. They were actually paid for their work in one form or another.

They either sharecropped or they were paid a wage. He augmented their labor at harvest time and at various other points in the year by going to the local jails in Atlanta, Macon, and Monticello, which is the Jasper County seat, and bailing out guys who were being held on trifling charges and bringing them in and holding them prisoner, forcing them to sleep in, in a locked-up bunkhouse. All the locks were on the outside of the place. You know, whipping them constantly for infractions real and imagined, abusing them pretty badly. He's not an old man, right? He didn't grow up with slaves, or did he? No, no. He was born in 1866. He mislavery by year.

You know, the context of this man's, you know, his reference points in this, that's how common this practice was. It was just the way it was done. Yeah. I don't know that. that Williams was necessarily the biggest practitioner, but he had one of the biggest spreads in Jasper County. And it was well known through the county that he was up to this. And no one ever made an attempt to stop him. And there is murder about this even before the story we're about to tell. Not unusual at the south of this time, obviously with all the lynchings and so forth. But this becomes part of life even on this plantation earlier than what we're about to talk about, right? It does. Going back at least to 1910 or so.

So Williams had not treated his acquisitions from the local jails gently. On several occasions had just murdered people for, again, infractions real or imagine. One elderly couple who had been on the farm for quite some time, he had said to have killed their shot to death simply because they had reached an age where they were no longer able to work as hard. Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing to remember is that as heinous as full-on slavery, chattel slavery had been, a slaveholder had a slaveholder had a slaveholder had a, financial incentive to keep his property healthy. He had a lot of money invested in his slaves. And consequently, although beatings were part of the picture, you wouldn't see a landowner necessarily beat someone to within an inch of his life that worked against his own interests. On the other hand, somebody who's holding peons, the only investment he has in those people

is the very small fine that he paid to get them out of jail. And he has very little financial incentive to care for them at all. He can kill them or work them to death and then simply go to the jail and get another her place. So Williams had demonstrated that he had very little regard for the lives and welfare of his people. I'll be back with more

American history after this short break. So we have crews who are coming back from the fields who are sleeping in locked bunk houses, in chains. They are enslaved by any definition of the word. There has been rumors of

murder on this plantation, but it's kind of an unopened secret. In 1920, though, a man named Gus Chapman, who has lived and worked at the Williams Place, he escapes and makes his way to the Bureau of Investigation, this is early FBI days in Atlanta, and tells them about the conditions there. Does he talk about the murders? Oh, he sure does. In fact, he probably wouldn't have achieved much traction with the agents had he not brought up the fact that he had seen murders take place before his eyes, particularly the murder of a peon who went by the nickname of Blackstrap, who had run away from the plantation, and Williams had fracked him down. So he reports this to the agents there, the FBI agents in Atlanta, who then come to investigate,

right? February 18th, 1921, they come out. Well, Gus Chapman tells the agents, another peon within very few days, also turned up at the Bureau of Investigation guy named James Strickland. He told a story that dovetailed perfectly with Gus Chapman's And at that point, the agents who were not thrilled about investigating peonage complaints because it's a difficult crime to invest, you know, to prove. And even if you establish that it's taking place, the punishments are pretty meager, usually. The agents decide after the second account, okay, we better go down and talk to the guy. So they take a drive down to Jasper County and spend some time with China's Wames.

What do they learn? I mean, they interview Black Farmhands there. Do they hear the story on the ground there? I would think not because it's a terrifying situation for them. They interview a number of workers, all of whom appear to be too terrified to say a word. They interview Williams, of course, and his sons at length. And Williams assures them that all the people working on his place are happy, you know, that no one's being held here against their will.

Nobody's blocked up. That's crazy. And although they see a bunkhouse with the locks on the outside, and although they are convinced by the response of the law, laborers that something's afoot that they need to get to the bottom of, they leave the plantation that day without taking any definitive action. They are suspicious, of course. I mean, something's going on here, and they know that there is possibly a lie being told. Oh, they have very little doubts at P&H is taking place. The strategy that they plan to pursue is to get some of these

laborers away from the plantation, away from Williams, so that they can speak freely. And with that in hand, they can then go back to the plantation and make some arrests. So at that point, rumors abound. I mean, people are talking and Williams figures he's a target, right? So he makes a decision to, the phrase is unbelievable, was passed on to me by a producer, to kill the evidence. And that's where this really gets weird. Yes, yes. He decides he faces a greater danger being prosecuted by the feds for peonage than he would be if he were to be prosecuted by the state for murder. So he decides, as you say, to destroy the evidence of Peonage. And he, yeah, that's unbelievably the decision he makes. Now, in the Pianage Act, the worst

you can face in a Pianage charge is five years and $5,000 or both. It's not a, it's a lot different from a murder charge. But Jonas Williams is a white man. And the only witnesses against him on either charge would be black. And he figures he has a better chance in state court among his neighbors, you know, with his neighbors as jurors than he would, going to Atlanta and sitting in federal court. It's a radical decision he makes. It's an insane calculation. It makes no sense, but he did it. So, Earl, let me get a handle on this. A criminal practice based on a con, which is essentially what Pianage is, involves the case of a plantation owner extracting a debt that can't be repaid from his laborers. It's a criminal practice known as Pianage, aka second

slavery, widespread across the South, finally draws the attention of the Atlanta office of the FBI. And Williams, this plantation owner, knows he's the target of suspicion of peonage and much worse. So here's when things get really gruesome. We talked in the last part about the killing of the evidence, which is a horrible term for essentially murdering his laborers, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What were the stakes here for Williams? We touched on it briefly, but I want to be clear. This is a man who is in total charge of his work. plantation owner, white farmer, has been getting away with this stuff for years, has even been known to murder laborers already. Suddenly this is what he faces because the feds have come looking.

Yeah, the forerunner of the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation. I think that Williams and probably quite a few others like him felt completely immune from the laws that govern the treatment of black people. I think that's really, I don't think that he viewed black people as anything more than livestock when you get down to it and conducting himself accordingly. He was a monster. He was not alone. So this is February of 1921. This is the horrendous act we've been referring to. He murders, or has murdered, 11 black farmhands. I'm going to read their names because I hate when these historic stories just become a bland sort of thing. Here they are. 11 names. Johnny Williams, John Will Gather, John Brown, Johnny Benson, Willie Preston, Harry Price, Lindsay Peterson,

Johnny Green, Willie Givens, Charlie Chisholm, and Fletcher Smith. That's how many people he murders in order to so-called kill his evidence. How did it happen? How did he murder these people? When did it happen over what period of time? Well, he made the decision a few days after the feds had visited the plantation that he had to take action. And so he enlisted the help of one of the labors who belonged to the families who actually lived on the plantation and had been there for a while. Young man named Clyde Manning, 27 years old. And he told Clyde, look, you know, we're going to have to kill all these people. We're going to kill everybody that we got out of the jails. And Manning tries to walk him out of it does not succeed. And so together they then, Manning having been threatened

with death himself if he didn't participate, they then work their way through the workforce. Of course, they shot one of the victims, Fletcher Smith. Williams dispatched him with a double-barreled shotgun. They bludgeoned to death for others, one of whom died while digging his own grave. Six of them, they bound with wire and chain, lashed them to bags of rock, and threw them alive off of local bridges into area rivers. All this happens in a weekend? I mean, it had to happen quick, right? Happened in about 12 days altogether.

How do the authorities discover this? How does it come to light? Well, he would have gotten away with this. These men would have been missed by no one. And the feds, may I might have been months before the feds came back to the plantation. And had they not seen any of the faces they recognized, they would have assumed probably that those men, you know, trapped in kind of a transient lifestyle had moved on. And Williams, I'm sure, would have told them that. Yeah.

But what happened was that the rivers ran low that February or that March. And a few days after the killing had stopped, a couple of bodies popped up in the Yellow River a few miles from the Williams plantation. And were discovered by a little boy playing on the river back. And that was the beginning of the end. So they immediately arrest Williams and Manning. So begins the prosecution of this case. Keep in mind, Pinoch has almost never tried in these days. But this one is clearly exceptional.

Although I wonder if it really was. I mean, that's the thing we got to keep in mind is that this is just, by scale, right? I mean, this is an ordinary circumstance that would have been talked about among plantation owners throughout history, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. I think that this scale was the key here. Bodies had probably turned up on a pretty regular basis throughout Jasper County and all of Georgia over the years, and no one had really given a whole lot of thought to it, as long as those bodies were black. You hear you got a body count that was impossible to ignore. And not only was it really prosecuted. It wasn't even known by most people. Most Americans had no idea what the word

peonage meant. They had never seen the word. You know, it was not a practice that was front and center in people's thinking. Well, this is an extraordinary story that deserves to be read about in full detail through your book called It's Hell Put to Shame, the 1921 murder farm massacre and the horror of Americans second slavery. This is what's so amazing about the story is that while we're immersed in an incredibly awful crime, really gruesome stuff, we're also immersed in this reality of America at this age. I think I venture to say most listeners are aware of segregation and the Jim Crow laws. We've heard all these terms so many times. Many people are not aware of the Pianage Act of 1867 and the failure of it. And therefore, the sort of system of second slavery that had gone

on for decades, 50 years. This is the norm. This is how things are going away. How much did Pianage actually usher in segregation or were they kind of separate institutions? I think they were just part of the mechanism of Jim Crow and of the black codes that came in right after the Civil War. Kind of a slight of hand way of keeping the black people down. Use a bunch of interlocking laws that they guarantee that they have to work. They can't leave their jobs, you know, without the permission of their employer. And so Peonage, it was an extreme facet of the whole Jim Crow picture, but it was in character for the times. It's a fascinating step-by-step process to go through objectively. What is taking place, you know, as Peonage is

outed, one of the things that happens is the founding of the NAACP, which is a reaction to so much violence in the South, the lynchings and so forth. 1909 it started in New York. This begins really the push back against this stuff. It wouldn't have happened without the coverage this case got from the North, would it? I mean, I'm not relating exactly to the founding of the NWC, but this is all part of this greater publicity and understanding of how horrific these practices down South have become. I think that's absolutely true. This put a face on what was an abstraction to most people, I think. Within weeks of the federal agents visit, in fact, February of 1921 to the plantation that got this whole thing started. The NWACP had just weeks before

appointed its first black leaders, famous Weldon Johnson. And, you know, Johnson and his lieutenant, Walter F. White, had been denouncing peonage for years at that point and had really very little to show for it. This case, heinous as it was, enabled them to really kind of beat the drum in a way that America noticed. How much of this was a George Floyd moment in that time? I think it was a George Floyd movement, and I think that's the case in Georgia more than any place else. I think that the horrific nature and the scale of this was such that the people closest to

the crime were the ones who reacted most stridently to it. This made news coast to coast and made news worldwide, in fact. This was a huge story, which made. it makes it all the more remarkable that it is completely vanished from the public consciousness. But in Georgia, this provoked self-loathing and horror to a degree that surprised me, at least, when I was doing the research, and really prompted a kind of a general spirit of meaiculpa among the white population. Ladies and gentlemen, you need to read this man's books. Earl Swift is a New York Times bestselling author known for Chesapeake Requiem on top of so many top ten lists back in 2018, about the 200-year-old crabbing. community on Tanger Island in the Chesapeake. Other titles like across the airless wilds,

autobiography, the big roads, Google them up, former reporter for the Virginia pilot. You write books that I just speak to me, Earl. I really like it. We have a similar sensibility, and I really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, Doc. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful, political, movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So

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