John Wallace Comer (13 June 1845 – 20 September 1919) was a businessman, slave owner, mine operator and planter in Alabama during the Reconstruction Era and the early 1900s.

Burrell, who was only 16 at the time,[7] took Comer to a bateau and rowed him down the Chattahoochee River to Columbus, Georgia, a distance of almost 260 miles.

The White League, a paramilitary group opposed to equal rights for newly emancipated African Americans in the southern United States, attacked a polling place in Spring Hill.

[2] Following their invasion of nearby Eufaula, the White League stormed the polling place in Spring Hill and destroyed the ballot box.

The League effectively led a coup d'etat in Barbour County as they removed all Republican officials from public office and installed Democrats instead.

Comer operated the plantation at Spring Hill using leased convict labor, a practice common in southern industry at the time, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After a visit to the Comer Plantation in Barbour County in 1883, Richard Dawson, the Alabama Prison Inspector, wrote: "Things in bad order.

"[11]At this time, residents of Barbour County were notorious for kidnapping and selling African Americans into bondage, to exploit their labor after the war to rebuild the wealth of Alabama's elite.

Local officials would arrest African Americans, use white juries to convict them of trumped-up charges, and fine them for their actions plus court costs.

Researchers have found that the bondsmen were charged for food and medical care; this meant that they were forced to incur debts so they would have to keep working as prisoners.

Once convicted of petty crimes, these citizens were subject to imprisonment, shackles, and the lash, and worked in the same fields where a few weeks earlier they had been independent, free laborers.

Ezekial Archey, a prisoner leased to Eureka mine, wrote that the convicts lived in a stockade "filled with filth and vermin.

Gunpowder cans were used to hold human waste that would fill up and 'run all over our beds where prisoners were shackled hand and foot for the night'.

[21] Jonathan Good testified to the Joint Commission created by the Roosevelt administration to investigate the use of peonage in Alabama enterprises.

He said that J. W. Comer, manager of the Eureka mines,ordered a captured black escapee to lie on the ground and the dogs were biting him.