At some point during Grace’s tour of the South—and perhaps before it even began—she stopped taking notes for an article and started gathering affidavits. In the lumber mills and the copper, coal, and phosphate mines, Grace began collecting evidence against the same evil she had heard about, and seen, at Buffalo Bluff—slavery through forced debt, or peonage. Grace was terrified about how far this practice might reach. After the Civil War, the South, rich in natural resources, needed laborers to replace the freed slaves. Unfortunately, there were still many landsmen unwilling to pay fairly for them.
When men were whipped or held against their will, Grace’s work wasn’t difficult—she took photos and notes. But some of the camps were more secretive. So Grace was patient and did interviews and took photographs. Grace didn’t want to wade through court for the next ten years; she wanted to take down the whole system. So she got her affidavits, sent them along, and moved on to the next place the whispers in the swamps took her. In New York, Grace liked to spend her time between court cases shopping on a street filled with bobbing hats and ribbons. Now, she lurked behind branches and ate crawfish in tents. As always, Grace was relentless. One night, while she got off a train, a shot was fired from the dark and just missed her. She kept moving forward.
Grace finally returned north in October, arriving in Washington dripping with fever but carrying forty-six affidavits. She got in to see Attorney General William Henry Moody, giving him signed letters, confessions, and photographs of men working in swamps with water reaching up to their waists. Moody, a Roosevelt trustbuster, had been trying to find proof of peonage for some time, and now he had usable evidence of the crime in the interior of the United States, hand delivered from a slightly ragged Grace Quackenbos.
Moody said that he would send Assistant Attorney General Charles W. Russell down to Florida to begin prosecuting these cases. They would need Grace as a witness, of course. When reporters asked Grace about her meeting with Moody, she “declined to discuss her trip to the South, and said that the matter being in the hands of the government it would be discourteous for her to talk about it.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the attorney general’s office realized that there was only one thing they could do with Grace besides thank her for her service to her country. They had to hire her.
Grace offered to work for free, if only her expenses were paid. Looking at her results, Moody couldn’t see how they could refuse her. They appointed her through Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, the site of the original Schwartz case and Grace’s base of operations. Stimson was a Yale man and new to the job, having just been appointed by President Roosevelt. He was young enough to still have black hair and a mustache that was cut close to his upper lip. In November 1906, Stimson appointed Grace to the Office of Special Assistant United States District Attorney. She was the first woman to be appointed to this office. By following the trail of one man’s tears, leading from New York to Jacksonville and back again, Grace had found a new focus for her powers.
The following spring, Grace returned to the South. This time, she was allowed a small retinue of agents and lawyers. She had helped shut down several of the larger operations in Florida, drawing the ire of the local newspapers. F. J. O’Hara, a lumber magnate, alleged that one of Grace’s agents had abducted one of his own workers. Grace’s operative apparently charged this man with killing a witness and cutting his body to pieces. O’Hara brought a $50,000 lawsuit against Grace, but it was dismissed. Representative Frank Clark, of Florida, also attacked Grace in the papers. He demanded to know who she was and how much she was being paid by the Department of Justice. Her inquiries into turpentine and railroad camps had the potential to stall Florida’s steady march of industrial progress, charged Clark. He was angry.
“To deal with a ‘muckraker’ is always unpleasant,” said Clark. “It is at no time agreeable to engage in disputation with that product of our present-day civilization known as ‘yellow journalism,’ which, for a few pennies and an opportunity to keep in the limelight, does not hesitate to calumniate an entire community.”
By April 1907, Henry Stimson was getting nervous. Public charges of murder in the newspapers, whether political rhetoric or not, were serious words. So Stimson, who had hired Grace (or at least had been asked to), wrote the attorney general to say that Grace lacked the character and skill to “deal with such an unscrupulous enemy.” She was doing good work, Stimson admitted, but he worried that she was angering a whole lot of people in the process. Stimson said that “the attitude of Mrs. Quackenbos is giving me considerable difficulty and concern.” Praising her investigative abilities, Stimson said that “her judgement as a lawyer in both the facts and the law was entirely untrustworthy.”
Attorney General Moody had been promoted to the Supreme Court at the close of the previous year. Succeeding him as attorney general was Charles Bonaparte, a short man with a wide forehead and smile. Bonaparte said, in his unmistakably musical voice, that the contents of Grace’s report were “revolting to every instinct of humanity” and are “repugnant to the enlightened opinion of modern times in all civilized countries.” Our goal, emphasized Bonaparte, was to “bring those guilty of them to adequate punishment.” Bonaparte reiterated that they didn’t intend to “stop their spending in this area.”
On the issue of Grace’s pay, Bonaparte said that “her compensation amounts only to what she is obliged to pay a competent person for taking her place in the office she has established as above described her own services being rendered gratuitously.” Grace returned to New York in March 1907, armed with more arrests and indictments in Florida.
Both Schwartz and other agents were eventually found guilty of peonage. But this was just the beginning: although Grace had already put a stop to a slew of turpentine farms and mines, there were still plenty of lumber camps that were guilty of peonage. While Schwartz was busy losing his company, Grace investigated the Jackson Lumber Company, whose employment agency was managed in the city by a group of Hungarians. But Grace couldn’t speak Hungarian, so she asked the Department of Justice for help. They assigned a special agent named Julius J. Kron to her service.