A Real Horror Story

Today I opened up the free local newspaper, Dekalb Neighbor, and leafed through it before dropping it in the recycle bin in the kitchen. The Lifestyle section had  a special on locally "haunted" places, and one of the articles was about the Decatur cemetery:

In 1879, Capt. Edward Cox shot and killed Lt. Col. Robert Alston. The two Georgia statesmen and Civil War veterans were in a heated debate over the state's convict labor laws. Alston was trying to put an end to the practice of renting out prisoners for profit while Cox was becoming rich on the corrupt system. Cox was convicted of murder but later pardoned. Now Cox and Alston lie just a few feet apart in the Decatur Cemetery. Cox's grave is one of the stops on the new Decatur Ghost Tour, co-founded by psychic Boo Newell. Since beginning tours in September, Ms. Newell said visitors have reported feeling cold, touched, pulled and breathed on at the grave site. "Cox is still here trying to prove he's the man," Ms. Newell said. "He feels he never got the credit he deserves." (Dekalb Neighbor, 28 October 2009, B:1)

Ms. Newell may be a psychic, but I think she's misread the vibes at this grave site. More likely, Cox is unable to sleep well in his grave because of a guilty conscience. The convict labor laws were instrumental in re-enslaving black Americans after the Civil War, especially in the South. Draconian laws were passed, guaranteed to gather in African-American men who could not pay the fines the courts levied against them, and so their sentences, often for ridiculous non-criminal activities such as "changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight carts without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity--or loud talk--with white women," were lengthened (quote from Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name).

In this way, the white South continued to profit from the unwilling labor of African-Americans. The system was corrupt and brutal--and continued well into the twentieth century until World War II. As Blackmon writes in the introduction to his well-documented history of the re-enslavement of African-Americans,

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. (Blackmon, p 7-8)

That people were well aware of the moral bankruptcy of forced convict labor is evidenced by the fact that Lt. Col. Alston, who fought in the Civil War, argued so strongly against its use that Captain Cox, profiting from just such a system, refused to hear those arguments, refused to countenance them so fiercely that he killed the man trying to convince him. That the whole society was complicit in the brutal system is illustrated by how long it lasted and by how that society viewed the man who murdered Lt. Col. Alston: Cox was pardoned. In fact, years later, when Lt. Col. Alston's widow died, The New York Times published a derisively dismissive obituary from Atlanta, GA., that not-so-subtly supported the murderous Captain Cox:

DEATH OF MRS. ROBERT A. ALSTON.

ATLANTA, Ga., Sept. 5--Mrs. Robert A. Alston died in Decatur to-night at 6  o'clock. She was the widow of the late Col. Robert A. Alston, who was murdered some years ago in the executive office by Capt. Edward Cox. The shock of her husband's death followed Mrs. Alston through life. Col. Alston was a liberal liver, and on his death left nothing, so that his widow's life has been much trouble. Capt. Cox, who was pardoned by Gov. Stephens, now occupies an official position here. (published September 6, 1884, from The New York Times archives)

No, I don't think that Capt. Cox is still trying to show "he's the man." More probably, he rests badly in his grave because he profited from murdering a man who was in the moral right, the man that the writer of that obituary sneered as being a "liberal liver."

And so here, I praise Captain Robert A. Alston, despite whatever faults he might have had personally, a man who tried to do what was morally right and was killed for it. The re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War is a real horror story that all Southerners should confront--or else sleep fitfully in their graves.