Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the elds hacked

  from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached

  gravestones clustered atop the hil stil bore the Cot ingham name.

  Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself,

  in an Alabama territory that was stil untamed. It was 1817, and

  Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by

  the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American

  nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would

  ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Paci c

  Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.

  Elisha's brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded

  county seat of Centrevil e, where in short order shal ow-draft

  riverboats would land and a trading center would be established.2

  Another brother, Wil iam, moved farther south. But Elisha and his

  younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In

  the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought

  in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and

  planted season upon season of cot on. The engines of their

  enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported

  them to Alabama and later bred more themselves—including Henry

  —from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic

  slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of

  ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising

  "Negroes for Sale." Manning farms strung along a looping wagon

  road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins,

  and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black

  labor to the rich black land, the Cot ingham brothers became

  prosperous and comfortable.

  Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

  Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

  Prat 's Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba

  and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the

  Cot inghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of

  Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had fel ed the

  rst timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work

  not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled

  into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water,

  imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the

  Cot inghams, this place was Riverbend.

  The Cot inghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their

  bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous

  investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especial y in contrast to

  the industrial slavery that would eventual y bud nearby, life on the

  Cot ingham plantation re ected the biblical understanding that

  cruelty to any creature was a sin—that black slaves, even if not

  quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.

  Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings,

  Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins

  built of rough-hewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock

  replaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded

  the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in

  their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single

  twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two

  young boys and a seven-year-old girl.3

  Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha's grandson

  Oliver, raised there on the Cot ingham farm, would have been a

  lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named

  Henry4 When Elisha Cot ing-ham's daughter Rebecca married a

  neighbor, Benjamin Bat le, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a

  wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and

  servant. "In consideration of the natural love and a ection which I

  bear to my daughter," Elisha wrote, I give her "a certain negro girl

  named Frances, about 14 years old."5

  Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

  Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

  neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a

  few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870—

  clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger

  human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his

  slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who

  ministered to al of the souls on the Cot ingham place. The Starr

  family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant

  dead, was set down the hil and toward the road, even more

  vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.

  Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation

  still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cot ingham

  master— giving permission to marry to a favored mulat o named

  Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha's side past

  emancipation and until the old master's death, would become the

  namesake of Henry and Mary's youngest son.

  But even as Elisha had al owed a strain of tenderness to co-reside

  with the brutal y circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost

  sight of their fundamental de nition—as cat le. They were creatures

  bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to

  daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate

  in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one

  slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought

  him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify,

  his newlywed daughter received al "future increase of the girl."6

  The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one

  year his junior, in 1868 was the rst among Cot ingham people,

  black or white, in two seasons. Another slave, Albert, had wed, and

  left for good in the middle of the rst picking time after the

  destruction of the war—amid the chaos and uncertainty when no

  one could be sure slavery had truly ended.7 Albert didn't wait to

  find out.

  Now, two years later, the coming marriage surely warmed Elisha

  at some level. But as Henry prepared to take a wife and become a

  man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

  man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

  forged—everything on which that gift to his daughter twenty years

  before had been predicated— hung in the fragile limbo of a

  transformed social order. Whatever satisfaction the lial ties gave

  the white master at the wedding of his former bondsman would

  have been tempered by the poverty and grief that had

  overwhelmed him.

  Most of Elisha's slaves remained nearby. Some stil worked his

  property, for wages or a share of the cot on crop. But the end of the

  war had left the white Cot inghams at a point of near desolation.

  The hard winter threatened to bring them to their knees.

  As Henry and Mary's wedding approached in 1868, whites across
<
br />   the South strained to accept the apparently inevitable ignominies

  descending from the war. The loss of fortunes, the war's blood and

  sorrow, the humiliation of Union soldiers encamped in their towns,

  al these things whites had come to bear. They would bear them a

  lit le longer, at least until the instant threats of hunger and military

  force receded.

  But these abominations paled against the specter that former

  slaves, with their huge mathematical majorities in Louisiana,

  Mississippi, southern Alabama, south Georgia, and South Carolina,

  would soon vote and rule governments and perhaps take their

  masters’ lands. This vision was a horror almost beyond

  contemplation. It poisoned the air for Elisha and other white

  landowners with prospects for even greater disaster.

  In the last days of ghting, the U.S. Congress had created the

  Freed-men's Bureau to aid the South's emancipated slaves.8 New

  laws gave the agency the power to divide land con scated by the

  federal government and to have "not more than forty acres of such

  land …assigned" to freedmen and black war refugees for a period of

  three years. Afterward, the law said former slaves would be al owed

  to purchase the property to hold forever. President Andrew

  Johnson rescinded the provision a few months later, but

  emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

  emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

  northern soldiers stil garrisoned across the region would eventual y

  parcel out to them al or part of the land on which they had long

  toiled.

  The threat that Elisha's former slaves would come to own his

  plantation—that he and his family would be landless, stripped of

  possessions and outnumbered by the very creatures he had bred and

  raised—was palpable.

  The last desperate ral ying cal s of the Confederacy had been

  exhortations that a Union victory meant the political and economic

  subjugation of whites to their black slaves. In one of the final acts of

  the Confederate Congress, rebel legislators asserted that defeat

  would result in "the con scation of the estates, which would be

  given to their former bondsmen."9

  Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by

  Gen. Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman to 400,000 acres of rich

  plantation land in South Carolina early in 1865. It was unclear

  whether blacks would be able to retain any of the property, but

  rumor ared anew among blacks across the South the next year at

  Christmastime—the end of the annual crop season—that plantation

  land everywhere would soon be distributed among them. The U.S.

  Congress debated such a plan openly in 1867, as it drew up the

  statutes to govern Reconstruction in the southern states. And again

  as harvest time ended that year, word whipped through the

  countryside that blacks would soon have land. At one point the

  fol owing year, in 1868, during a period of intense speculation

  among freed slaves that land was soon to be provided to them,

  many blacks purchased boundary markers to be prepared for the

  marking of of their forty-acre tracts.10

  Forty miles to the west of the Cot ingham farm, in Greene

  County, hundreds of former slaves led suit against white

  landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be

  compel ed to pay wages earned during the prior season's work.

  Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it al

  1,800 lawsuits filed by the freedmen.11

  Despite Bibb County's remote location, far from any of the most

  famous military campaigns, the Civil War had not been a distant

  event. In the early months of ghting, Alabama industrialists

  realized that the market for iron su cient for armaments would

  become lucrative in the South. In 1860 only Tredegar Iron Works, a

  vast industrial enterprise in Richmond, Virginia, driven by more

  than 450 slaves and nearly as many free laborers, could produce

  bat le-ready cannon for the South. The Confederate government,

  almost from the moment of its creation, set out to spur additional

  capacity to make arms, particularly in Alabama, where a nascent

  iron and coal industry was already emerging and lit le ghting was

  likely to occur. During the war, a dozen or more new iron furnaces

  were put into blast in Alabama;12 by 1864, the state was pumping

  out four times more iron than any other southern state.

  Across Alabama, individual property holders—slaveholders

  speci cal y— were aggressively encouraged to at empt primitive

  industrial e orts to support the Confederate war e ort. The rebel

  government o ered generous inducements to entrepreneurs and

  large slave owners to devote their resources to the South's industrial

  needs. With much of the major plantation areas of Mississippi

  under constant federal harassment, thousands of slaves there were

  without work. Slave owners wil ing to transport their black workers

  to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid

  conscription into the southern armies.

  After seeing their homes and stockpiles of cot on burned, W H.

  and Lewis Thompson, brothers from Hinds County, Mississippi, and

  the owners of large numbers of slaves, moved to Bibb County

  midway through the war to mine the Cahaba coal elds for the

  Confederacy. They opened the Lower Thompson mine, and later

  another relative and his slaves arrived to dig another mine. The coal

  was hauled eleven miles to Ashby and then shipped to Selma. The

  mining was crude, using picks and hand-pul ed carts. The slaves

  drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the

  surface.13

  surface.

  A neighbor of the Cot inghams, local farmer Oliver Frost,

  regularly took his slaves to a cave on Six Mile Creek to mine

  saltpeter—a critical ingredient for gunpowder—for the Confederate

  army, often remaining there for weeks at a time. The Fancher

  family, on a farm three miles north of the crossroads community

  cal ed Six Mile, regularly hauled limestone from a quarry on their

  property to a Bibb County furnace during the war.14

  The centerpiece of the Alabama military enterprises was a

  massive and heavily forti ed arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and

  gunpowder mil located in the city of Selma. To produce its

  weapons and metal plating for use on ironclad ships critical to the

  Confederacy's limited naval operations, the Selma works relied on

  enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby

  Shelby and Bibb counties.15 Alabama iron was particularly wel

  suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying

  bat le ships with steel plates. Iron forged at Alabama's Cane Creek

  Furnace, in Calhoun County, had been utilized for a portion of the

  armor used to convert the hul of the captured USS Merrimac into

  the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862,

  bat le of ironclads.16 The Confederacy was hungry for as much of

  the material as it could get.

  Of particular strategic value were ironworks e
stablished by local

  investors in 1862 in the vil age of Brier eld. Nine miles from the

  Cot ing-ham place, the Brier eld Iron Works produced the plates

  that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during

  the bat le of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage

  of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her

  hul .17 Bibb County iron quickly became a coveted material.

  As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever

  increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brier eld

  Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or

  lease African Americans. Foundries routinely commissioned labor

  agents to prowl across the southern states in search of available

  slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

  slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

  Brier eld operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control

  its output. The purchase encompassed "its property of al kinds

  whatsoever," including thousands of acres of land and a catalogue of

  dozens of wagons, wheelbarrows, coal sleds, axes, and blacksmith

  tools. On the list of livestock were seventy mules, forty-one oxen,

  and nine black men: "John Anderson, aged about 35, Dennis, about

  38, George, about 30, Charles, about 47, Perry, about 40, Curry

  about 17, Mat hew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about

  30 years."18

  The Confederate government began construction of a second

  furnace at the site shortly after acquiring the property. Al of its

  output went to the Selma Arsenal, fty miles by railroad to the

  south, where the iron was used for armor and for naval guns,

  including the state-of-the-art eleven-inch Brooke ri ed cannon, with

  a capacity of ring a 230-pound shel more than two thousand

  yards.19

  By the standards of the antebel um South, the Brier eld Iron

  Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder. The adjacent vil age

  held church in a schoolhouse surrounded by the tenements and

  smal housing for three hundred workers. Two massive brick blast

  furnaces, each forty feet high, belched a thick brew of smoke and

  gases at the top and a torrent of lique ed iron at the base. Nearby

  was a rol ing mil where the molten iron was formed into crude

  one-hundred-pound "pigs" for shipment to Selma, and loaded onto