James W . English 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 postbellum mayor of Atlanta , Georgia , from 1881 until 1883 . 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 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 Walton and Poplar in the Fairlie - Poplar district . The home was torn down soon after , one of the last single - family home s in downtown Atlanta . English was one of Atlanta ’ s most prominent citizens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , and an ardent promoter of a New South , based on industry rather than cotton . He quickly achieved success in business and politics . He served as a city council member , school board member , the police commissioner and the mayor of Atlanta , a bank president , and owner of several industrial enterprises . While he was not descended from the antebellum 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 . ” Before a legislative commission in 1908 , former guards as well as workers , reported that at the brickyard prisoners “ were forced to work under unbearable circumstances , fed rotting and rancid food , housed in barracks rife with insects , driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant , and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens . ” English countered with a denial that he or any member of his family had ever directed “ any act of cruelty ” against any convict . In fact , he claimed , he had ordered his manager of operations to ensure that “ workers were well fed , well shod , well clothed , and well cared for … . ” Although one former guard estimated that 200 to 300 laborers were flogged each month , English angrily protested , “ If a warden in charge of those convicts ever committed an act of cruelty to them … and it had come to my knowledge , I would have had him indicted and prosecuted . ” Another witness testified that , if English had come within a quarter mile of the plant , he would have heard the screams of men being beaten . English conceded that the work at the brickyard was so brutal that “ not a class of [ free ] white labor in Georgia … could stand it a week . ” English insisted he only used convict labor to do “ work that a white man cannot and will not perform . " He also employed convicts at a large sawmill , the Iron Belt Railroad and Mining Company , and the Durham Coal and Coke Company , which in 1908 owned leases on 430 convicts . Its operations included some particularly dangerous mine shafts , sections of which were filled waist - high with water . Workers were not provided with adequate timbers for bracing and cave - ins were frequent . Even when materials were provided , they often neglected to use them since they feared , if they took time to protect themselves , they would not complete their daily task and consequently be whipped by whipping bosses who would sometimes embed their lashes with sand to increase the severity of the punishment . English routinely violated the law by buying and selling the leases on convict laborers and thereby transferring them as if they were slaves . For example , in 1883 he purchased half of John T . Milner ’ s Coalburg mine company and , “ in an overtly illegal aspect of the transaction , a lot of one hundred black convicts . ” A witness before the legislative commission reported , “ On Sunday afternoons , white men frequently met in the yard of the English brick factory to swap or buy black men , little changed from the slave markets of a half century earlier . ”