Resident Strangers

Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama

Jennifer E. Brooks

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780807177570
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently.Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham. Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.

CHAPTER 1

“THE BONE AND SINEW
OF OTHER
STATES AND COUNTRIES”

Planters, Industrialists, and Immigrant Recruitment in New South Alabama

Two decades before Dolphina Lesko arrived in Brookside, an excited crowd of white businessmen, planters, and boosters from around north-central Alabama gathered in Birmingham on a September evening in 1875 to hear a speech by Colonel H. S. Hyatt, an immigration agent from Saint Louis. This “large and respectable number of the representative farmers of the county and businessmen of the city,” reported the Birmingham Iron Age, were “anxious to hear” Colonel Hyatt’s impressions after several days spent touring the state’s nascent industrial district. The attendees anticipated “an interesting address” from the man who credited himself with “inducing Western immigration from the Eastern and Middle States” by those who were “now prepared to exchange a frozen climate with grass hoppers and expensive lands” for a better climate, good soil, and cheaper living.

Hyatt did not disappoint, proceeding to outline the “comparative advantages of climate and season in favor of the South” and noting that while the long winter disrupted productivity on the plains of the Midwest, in the South “every day can be utilized in work.” “The economy of living” proved more favorable in Alabama, as well, due to “cheaper fuel, less expensive clothing, and rentals.” Hyatt also cited his success in relocating “respectable” immigrants to Mississippi and western Alabama, who were then able to purchase “their farms and workshops,” thus assuring his audience that “his business was not with paupers and wharf-rats, but only with men of substance.”

Hyatt’s message particularly resonated with a group of men representing the Elyton Land Company, a joint stock outfit devoted to profiting from Alabama’s mineral resources. “Many of the stockholders of the Elyton Land Company,” reported the newspaper, promptly decided to “confer with Col. Hyatt, with a view to obtaining his services through his western agencies to bring capital and skilled labor to our city and county.” Accompanied by Birmingham industrialist Colonel Sloss, Hyatt soon departed for Kentucky for a meeting with railway officials “in regard to transportation of immigrants over their line.” Colonel Hyatt, gushed the editor, soon would return to the West “fully impressed” that “no region in the United States presented such attractions for manufacturing” nor offered such a “genial, equable, and healthful climate,” all the while providing “every element which makes iron . . . close at hand.” In fact, Alabama would reward “the farmer, and the horticulturist, the skilled laborer and common mechanic, the stock and fruit raiser and all trades, avocations, and employments of life” for “their labors by a liberal increase.”1 Indeed, as Colonel Hyatt’s experience seemed to validate, the world was postwar Alabama’s oyster.

Immigration fever swept up planters, industrialists and speculators across the region, spurring recruitment campaigns in nearly every southern community, animated as much by anxiety as by an optimistic faith in the future. Alabama’s political and economic leaders ultimately hoped to recruit sufficient immigration either to relieve them of dependence on Black laborers or to compel those laborers’ obedience. Like other Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they believed race and nationality determined temperament and character. Thus, recruiters justified immigration campaigns with a rhetoric that both denigrated African Americans and heralded Northern and Western Europeans as the ideal replacements. Such rhetoric and intent placed Alabama’s recruiters in the company of employers confronted with the new reality of emancipation across the plantation world and of imperialists confounded by the difficulties of coercing native-born laborers.2

Ultimately, availability, a reputation for docility, and a willingness to work for meager wages in rough conditions differentiated a good prospect from an unsuitable one. Much like British and American imperialists who rejected “indigenous” labor as too fractious and unreliable, Alabama’s employers looked to foreign-born settlers and laborers as vulnerable populations they could more easily exploit. Their racialized inclination to define Northern and Western Europeans as the most capable of contributing to the New South project remained in constant tension with their basic hunger for any laborer who was available, obedient, and subject to being coerced.3

Colonel Hyatt’s exuberant vision in 1875 of what New South Alabama could be stood in sharp relief to reality on the ground. The ruination of the southern economy, along with the physical devastation caused by the Civil War, still made recovery a daunting mountain to climb. Union General James Wilson described north Alabama in 1865 as “complete destitution,” with the “entire Tennessee valley” devoid of supplies “in all directions, for a hundred and twenty miles.”4 Marching armies had burned depots and cotton bales and destroyed steamboats, industrial mills, and iron furnaces. Approximately forty thousand Alabamians perished in the war, with another thirty-five thousand veterans returning as partially or permanently disabled. Emancipation brought welcome freedom to the state’s enslaved people, who numbered about half of the population, but it also cost the economy more than $200 million in “capital investment.” And the plantation labor system that had long sustained southern agriculture was tilted upside down. Whether or not they had been worked by enslaved labor, all farms felt the disruption of lost population, abandoned fields, ruined crops, and stolen or slaughtered livestock.5

Emancipation especially amplified white fears about the future. Alabama’s white landowners had only to glance across the Gulf to Santo Domingo and the British Caribbean to find out what this rocky transition to free labor might mean: a hurricane of labor disruption that upset every stabilizing feature of plantation society, most notably the presence of a regular and coercible supply of labor.6 Moreover, severe flooding caused the failure of corn and cotton crops in Alabama during the first years after the war, and several smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever outbreaks created additional hardship.

Nor did Alabama have much of an industrial base in 1865 to mitigate the slack in the agricultural economy. In 1860, only eleven railroads and around 743 miles of track traversed the state, and Union cavalry raiders had ripped up miles of rails in central Alabama during the war.7 State officials recognized the expansion of railroads as the critical step in boosting the state’s economic recovery, particularly to facilitate the development of mineral resources in the northern tier of the state. Reconstruction Governor William Smith endorsed more than $4 million in bonds for the construction of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, which eventually cut across the state to Mississippi to create a new avenue for Gulf Coast shipping. Other railroad building proposals soon followed.8

Issuing bonds to build railroads addressed one question.9 But who would lay the track? The freed people across the South refused to assume the mantle of anything that even hinted at unfree labor, and they were quite anxious to obtain land of their own, if at all possible.10 Such hopes drifted onto fallow soil, however, under first an ineffectual economic Reconstruction and then the conservative resurgence that overturned Republican rule.11 As factories boomed in the northeast; cotton and sugar cultivation expanded in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana; sawmills and timber camps took root in the upcountry, piney woods, and wiregrass regions; and westward settlement accelerated, the freed people seemed to have choices where there had been none at all for so long.12 That mobility played a central role in augmenting southern white employers’ sense of labor crisis.

From the late 1860s onward, rumors of African Americans plotting to leave their communities for the promise of more hospitable locales, or at least better opportunities, flew across the plantations of the deep South. Nor were such rumors completely unfounded.13 Alabama, specifically, had the added context of the Birmingham industrial boom that began in the 1880s, exerting even more pressure on the stability of the rural agricultural labor supply throughout the New South era.

Census data do not document the sort of steep population decline in Black communities before World War I that the litany of white complaints about labor shortages would suggest.14 Natural increase also added to the southern Black population. However, the decennial snapshot that the census took could not easily track the actual flow of people moving in and out of rural and urban communities.15 It was this mobility, both perceived and real, that kept many a southern planter pacing the floors at night, worried about having no crop harvested at all if they could not deflate African American pressure for better terms. Black laborers moved into towns such as Montgomery or Birmingham, or to expanding cotton or sugar lands and sawmill and turpentine camps in deep South states such as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, or to other parts of the United States or even other countries.16

A sustained and widespread transfer of Black southerners out of the region required better nonagricultural employment opportunities elsewhere, which did not develop extensively until World War I opened the floodgates for the Great Migration to the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast.17 Even prior to World War I, however, plenty of schemes to recruit Black labor away from southern farms and plantations generated among southern white employers and their allies a persistent interest in using immigrant laborers to replace Black laborers or to discipline them at home.

Across the New South era, labor agents worked to deliver Black bodies to employers in competing southern communities, western territories and states, and in a number of foreign countries. A common interest in locating cheap labor that could be controlled united planters around the world, even as it simultaneously set them in competition with each other.18 Labor agents intent on luring laborers to farms, plantations, and camps as close as the Mississippi Delta and as far away as Hawaii circulated among clusters of Black populations.19 A New York City newspaper in 1887, for example, described labor agents operating throughout the deep South to recruit Black laborers to help develop new agricultural bottomlands now protected by levees in the Mississippi Delta. According to the paper, agents tried to lure recruits with tales of the Yazoo Delta “as a veritable paradise; where labor was scarcely needed to produce crops.” Hundreds of hopeful African Americans reportedly came into Vicksburg each day from the Mississippi hill country, but also from Alabama. The writer estimated that around twenty-five thousand African Americans had arrived in the Delta by January of 1887. Upcountry planters now looked to “get white labor from the West” or to tap the supply in poorer Black regions of Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, “from which there is also a marked emigration movement just at present.” Indeed, “at every station along the Vicksburg and Meridian Railroad there are negroes awaiting transportation westward.”20

If Mississippi, Louisiana, or Arkansas seemed too much of the same old thing, there was always the mythic West. William A. Ash, a “prominent and influential colored man of Montgomery, Ala.,” reported one newspaper, had in 1880 recently returned from a trip to investigate “how the colored people were getting along who have been flocking to Kansas from the south for three years.” Ash planned to report “the facts to the colored people of Montgomery and Madison County, Ala. who are now desirous of emigrating to Kansas in large numbers.” African Americans felt utterly disfranchised in the state of Alabama, Ash explained, and so “they must seek a new home where their labor would do more [and] where their political rights would be guarded and respected.” In Kansas, it seemed, “the prospects before the colored people . . . were good.” Drought had been a problem for the crops in 1880, yet African Americans in Saline County had acquired modest homesteads, “paying for the land in installments, and . . . building neat and comfortable homes of their own.” In “Tennessee Town,” “the country is dotted with little cottages that have been erected by the colored people, within two or three years, who are now living independently in their own homes [and] the men find employment.” Ash thus expected “to see a thousand colored people emigrating from Madison and Montgomery counties, Alabama, next spring.”21

In 1889, Alabama whites appeared to be “tremendously stirred up just now,” according to the Indianapolis Journal, “over the tremendous exodus of negroes from the Black Belt . . . [as] railroad agents ‘have been ticketing hundreds of negroes to the West.’” A white Black Belt Alabama landowner lamented to the writer in early 1889 that “he had not been able to get negro laborers on his place, and feared he would have to turn the fields out to grass.” Reportedly, forty Black families had fled one Wiregrass county in southeastern Alabama on the same day, destined for Texas and joining others heading there, or to Louisiana or Mississippi. Moreover, “an agent of the Alabama Midland Railroad is here to-day trying to get up some negro laborers to work on that road, which is now in the course of construction from Bainbridge, Georgia.” The Midland agent stopped first in Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “The Bone and Sinew of Other States and Countries”: Planters, Industrialists, and Immigrant Recruitment in New South Alabama
• 2. “John Chinaman” in New South Alabama
• 3. “Italians . . . in the Colored Quarters”: Immigrant and African American Encounters in New South Alabama
• 4. “A Few Depraved White Men and the Worst Element of Negroes”: Immigrants, African Americans, and the Birmingham Strikes
• 5. “The Land of Snakes, Crocodiles, Negroes, Yellow Fever, and Death”: The Immigrant Experience in New South Alabama
• 6. “The Scum of the Foreign Element”: The Trials of the Blocton Four
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index