Alonzo Bailey

In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the U.S. Supreme Court found the state’s peonage law, which had legalized forced labor for people in debt, in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. Although the decision did not immediately affect peonage laws in other southern states, it set a precedent for the Supreme Court to strike down similar laws in Georgia and Florida in the 1940s.

Derived from labor practices in Spanish Mexico, peonage was a system in which a person could be compelled to work, usually to repay a debt. Despite being outlawed in the United States by the 1867 Peonage Abolition Act, many southern states found different ways to subject lower-class Black workers to forced labor, including vagrancy laws enacted during Reconstruction to restrict the mobility of freedmen in search of work. Holding debtors in peonage in the United States occurred primarily in the South, in the turpentine region in southern Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Florida panhandle. It also occurred in the cotton belt that stretched from South Carolina into Mississippi. One researcher noted that the practice was common in Lowndes, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Counties, where employers were aided by corrupt local officials. There was a surge in cases in the early 1900s.

Alonzo Bailey’s case typified the harsh circumstances of many Black agricultural workers under the peonage system in the South. On December 26, 1907, he had signed a contract with H. C. Borden, manager of the Riverside Company, a corporate farm, to work as a farm laborer at the Scotts Bend Place in Montgomery County. Typical of these contracts, Bailey received a $15 advance that he would repay from his $12 monthly salary. After working for a month and a few days, Bailey quit and refused to refund the money. According to Alabama law at the time, breaking a labor contract and refusing to pay back the advance meant that Bailey was criminally liable. For this he was sentenced to a fine of $30 and subsequently sentenced to 136 days at hard labor for failing to pay the fine and costs.

A recently enacted state law criminalized workers breaking work contracts for what would have formerly been a breach of contract dispute and a civil offense. The law also prohibited defendants from explaining their reasons for leaving and leaving them unable to plead their case. Before his likely conviction, imprisonment, and work on a chain gang, Bailey’s wife asked a young Montgomery attorney, Edward S. Watts, to appeal the local court’s ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court.

The case caught the attention of Judge William H. Thomas, the city court judge for Montgomery. Thomas, who had doubts about how this Alabama state law operated, sought a test case to bring a challenge to the law before the U.S. Supreme Court. Thomas found his chance when Bailey and his lawyer petitioned his court for a writ of habeas corpus to contest Bailey’s detention and stall the case. Bound by Alabama State Supreme Court precedent, Thomas denied the petition but actively assisted Watts in bringing the case before the Alabama Supreme Court.

Booker T. Washington

After the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality, Watts worked to bring the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Thomas and his former law partner, Fred Ball, assisted Watts in this effort. The group also had an ally in Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington, with whom they corresponded covertly. He strongly opposed peonage and provided financial assistance and connected the group to his prominent friends. Washington even directly appealed to U.S. Atty. Gen. Charles J. Bonaparte to join the legal team.

Former Alabama governor Thomas Goode Jones, then a federal judge for Alabama’s northern and middle districts, was an unlikely ally. During the Civil War, he rose to become a prominent soldier in the Confederate Army and was a well-known member of the Bourbon wing of the Democratic Party, which supported White supremacy during Reconstruction. In later years, though, he had befriended Booker T. Washington. Communicating secretly, Jones and Washington coordinated to assist and publicize the case. Jones also prepared a brief he submitted to the court and kept Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who had appointed Jones to his post with the help of Washington, confidentially apprised of developments. In the years prior to the Bailey case, the reform-minded Jones was publicly opposed to peonage and had presided over a series of trials related to peonage and struck down one Alabama state law pertaining to the practice. His efforts in fighting peonage resulted in a number of convictions, but the lenient sentences Jones imposed and his pardoning of those convicted did not deter others from engaging in the practice.

Thomas Goode Jones

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue, and Watts presented his case on October 20 and 21, 1910. Alabama attorney general Alexander M. Garber argued that the law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment or due process. Watts and Ball countered that the law allowed employers to keep their employees in involuntary servitude by threat of prosecution.

Delivered on January 3, 1911, in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the court overturned the Alabama Supreme Court and deemed the practice of peonage unconstitutional based on the Thirteenth Amendment. The court found that the practice of peonage fell under the broad protections of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited involuntary servitude. Additionally, the court found that the peonage law, in connection with the state’s rules of evidence, had stripped Bailey of his presumption of innocence.

Although opponents of peonage were victorious in Alabama, many states in the South continued the practice for the next few decades. In 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened anti-peonage laws in United States v. Reynolds. Arising from a case that went to the Southern District of Alabama, the court ruled that imposing criminal penalties on those who failed to work constituted involuntary servitude under the Thirteenth Amendment. Alabama law at the time allowed employers to remove people from jail after paying fines and working them as prisoners. Finally, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s contract labor law and Florida’s in 1944.