James Warren English (October 28, 1837February 15, 1925) was an American politician, bank president, and a staff officer during the American Civil War. He was a reconstruction Era mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, from 1881 until 1883.
Life
English was born in Orleans Parish, Louisiana. His father died when he was 12 and his mother two years later. At the age of 15, he became an apprentice carriage-maker and worked at it industriously for four years while attending night school, when he moved to Griffin, Georgia. He married Emily Alexander and raised a family.
He enlisted in the Confederate States Army on April 20, 1861, and served in Virginia, rising to the rank of captain. On the night of April 7, 1865, in the company of Colonel Heman H. Perry, assistant adjutant general of Moxley Sorrel's brigade, English received the first written communication from Grant to Lee about a surrender, which happened soon after at Appomattox Court House.
Following his parole, English arrived in Atlanta on May 14, 1865, where he later became a banker. On December 1, 1880, he defeated developer H. I. Kimball to become mayor, taking office in January. He served as president of the American Trust and Banking Company (later rechartered as the Fourth National Bank) for thirty years. He also served twenty-four years on the board of directors of the Central of Georgia Railway Company. He was one of the incorporators of the 1883 Fulton County Street Railroad, which would later become famous for its Nine-Mile Circle route to what is now Virginia-Highland.
From 1871 until his death, he resided on Cone Street between Luckie and Poplar in the Fairlie-Poplar district. The home was torn down soon after he died; it was one of the last single-family homes in downtown Atlanta. Atlanta's English Avenue was named for J.W. English, Junior. James W. English, Sr., was one of the directors of the 1887 Piedmont Exposition.
English was one of Atlanta's most prominent citizens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was an ardent promoter of a New South, based on industry rather than on cotton. He quickly achieved success in business and politics. He served as a city council member, school board member, the police commissioner, the mayor of Atlanta, a bank president, and owner of several industrial enterprises.
James English & convict leasing
While he was not descended from the antebellum era aristocracy and had never owned a slave before emancipation, by 1897 "his enterprises controlled 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in brick making, cutting cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction, and turpentining." His "great personal wealth was inextricably linked to the enslavement of thousands of men."
English was most closely identified with the Chattahoochee Brick Company, which manufactured many of the bricks used to construct Atlanta's streets and some of its oldest neighborhoods. Although its methods were nearly identical to those used centuries before, it achieved high levels of productivity and vast profits by subjecting the convict laborers it leased from the city to brutal discipline and cruel deprivation. The Chattahoochee Brick Company was "the biggest and arguably most abusive buyer of forced laborers in Georgia."
English insisted he only used convict labor to do "work that a white man cannot and will not perform."