Slavery by Another Name
Page 4
a railroad line extended into the factory yard. One hundred yards
away sat a kiln for ring limestone, ten tons of which was fed each
day into the furnaces. Beyond the kiln was a quarry for the endless
task of repairing the stone furnaces, a sawmil , and then seven
thousand acres of forest from which fuel for the constantly burning
fires was cut.20
The nine slaves owned by the ironworks were an anomaly. Few
industrial enterprises wanted to actual y purchase slaves. They were
too expensive at acquisition, and too costly and di cult to
maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become
maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become
uncooperative, or die. Far preferable to the slave-era industrialist
was to lease the slave chat el owned by other men.
In 1864, however, few such workers could be found anymore.
Instead, the Confederate o cer commanding the Brier eld iron
production operation, Maj. Wil iam Richardson Hunt, rented two
hundred slaves to perform the grueling tasks necessary to continue
equipping the rebel army.21 Late in the war, as the need for the
area's coal and iron capacity grew dire, the Confederate government
began to forcibly impress the slaves held by whites in the county. A
son of Rev. Starr's—a doctor and also a resident of the Cot ingham
Loop—became the government's agent for seizing slaves.22 There is
no surviving record of which black men were pressed into service.
But by war's end, Scipio Cot ingham, the sixty-three-year-old slave
who had shared the farm longest with master Elisha, had come to
identify himself as a foundry man. Almost certainly, he had been
among those rented to the Brier eld furnace and compel ed to help
arm the troops fighting to preserve his enslavement.
As the war years progressed, ever larger numbers of local men from
near the Cot ingham farm left for bat le duty. Two of Elisha's sons
fought for the Confederacy. Moses and James, both husbands and
fathers, each saw gruesome action, personal injury, and capture by
the Union. Elisha's grandson Oliver, too young to ght with the
troops, joined the Home Guard, the ragtag platoons of old men and
teenagers whose job was to patrol the roads for deserters, eeing
slaves, and Union scouts.
In the beginning, large crowds gathered at the stores in the
crossroads set lement of Six Mile to send them o , and groups of
women worked together to sew the uniforms they wore. Soldiers on
the move through the area were a regular sight, crossing the Cahaba
on the ferry near the mouth of Cot ingham Creek, and traversing the
main road from there toward the rail towns to the east.23
Confederate soldiers camped often on the Cot ingham farm,
stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the
stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the
plantation's supplies and food, exchanging spent horses for fresh
ones. At one point late in the war, an entire regiment set camp in
the field, erecting tents and lighting cooking fires.24
The appearance of Confederate soldiers must have been an
extraordinary event in the lives of the black members of the
Cot ingham clan. The war years were a con icted period of
confused roles for slaves. They were the subjects of the Union
army's war of liberation, and the victims of the South's economic
system. Yet at the same time, slaves were also servants and
protectors of their white masters. In the woods near the Cot ingham
home, slaves guarded the horses and possessions of their white
owners, hidden there to avoid raids of northern soldiers. Some
slaves took the opportunity to ee, but most stayed at their posts
until true liberation came in the spring of 1865.
The foundry and arsenal at Selma and the simple mines and
furnaces around the Cot ingham farm that supplied it with raw
materials had taken on outsized importance as the war dragged on.
The Alabama manufacturing network became the backbone of the
Confederacy's ability to make arms,25 as the Tredegar factories were
depleted of raw materials and skil ed workers and menaced by the
advancing armies of Ulysses S. Grant. Preservation of the Alabama
enterprises was a key element of a last-ditch plan by Je erson
Davis, the southern president, to retreat with whatever was left of
the Confederate military into the Deep South and continue the
war.26
For more than a year, Union forces in southern Tennessee and
northern Alabama massed for an anticipated order to obliterate any
continued capacity of a rump Confederate government to make
arms. Smal groups of horse soldiers made regular probing raids,
against minimal southern resistance. In April of 1864, Alabama's
governor wired Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of
rebel forces in Alabama and Mississippi, imploring him to send
additional troops. "The enemy's forces …are fortifying their position
with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the
with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the
forces wil work way South and destroy the valuable works in
Central Alabama…. Can nothing be done?"27
Final y in March 1865, a mass of 13,500 Union cavalrymen
swept down from the Tennessee border, in one of the North's
penultimate death blows to the rebel ion. Commanded by Gen.
James H. Wilson, the Union army, wel dril ed and amply armed,
split into three huge raiding parties, each assigned to destroy key
elements of Alabama's industrial infrastructure. Moving
unchal enged for days, the federal troops burned or wrecked iron
forges, mil s, and massive stockpiles of cot on and coal at Red
Mountain, Irondale, and Helena, north of Bibb County. On the
morning of March 30, Union soldiers slogged down the rain-
drenched roads into Columbiana, destroying the machinery of the
Shelby Iron Works, shoving its equipment into local wel s and
streams, and freeing the slaves critical to its operations.
Against nearly hopeless odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former
slave dealer who had become the South's most storied horseman,
met the blue advance at a point south of the town of Monteval o.
Skirmishing along Mahan Creek, just miles from the Cot ingham
farm, Forrest's disorganized command could only harass Wilson's
advance. Northern troops took the Brier eld furnace on March 31,
and left it a ruin.
Outmanned and outfought, with ooding creeks blocking his
maneuvers, Forrest, himself slashed by a saber in savage ghting on
April 1, retreated for a nal stand at Selma. The next day, Wilson's
troops charged the fortified industrial complex in Selma, and routed
Forrest's remaining four thousand men. The Confederate general
slipped away with an escort of one hundred soldiers, massacring as
he made his escape most of a contingent of twenty- ve sleeping
Union scouts he stumbled upon in a field.
Federal forces captured nearly three thousand of Forrest's men,
along with more than sixty pieces of e
ld cannon, scores of heavy
artil ery guns, nine factories, ve major iron forges, three foundries,
twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and
twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and
35,000 bales of cot on. The arsenal, factory shops, and foundries at
Selma were systematical y destroyed. Perhaps most shocking to
local whites, before moving on to at ack Georgia, Wilson's o cers
quickly raised a one-thousand-man regiment of black troops, placed
under the command of the Third Ohio Cavalry28
With the remaining Confederate armies commanded by Gen.
Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unable to unite,
Je erson Davis's hope to continue the rebel ion as a guerril a
struggle col apsed. Cut o from his remaining troops, his Alabama
munitions system destroyed, deprived of the last regions of relative
security in the South, he at empted to ee to Texas or Mexico.
Under hot pursuit by detachments of General Wilson's troops, he
was captured by Union forces in Georgia weeks later. The war
came final y to its end.
Alabama had su ered losses totaling $500 mil ion—a sum
beyond comprehension in 1865. The total value of farm property
was reduced during the war from $250 mil ion to less than $98
mil ion, including the loss of slaves. Al banks in the state had
col apsed. Agricultural production levels would not match that of
1860 for another forty years.29
But the nal days of the war proved to be only the beginning of a
more inexorable and anarchic struggle. A vicious white insurgency
against the Union occupation and the specter of black citizenship
began to take shape, presaged by the conduct of Home Guard
patrols like the one Oliver Cot ingham had joined. The patrols,
uncoordinated and increasingly contemptuous of any authority
during the war, had come to be known more as bandits and thugs
than defenders of the Confederacy. After four years of conscriptions
verging on kidnappings, violence perpetrated against critics of
rebel ion, and ruthless seizures of supplies and property, the Home
Guard was in many places as despised as the Yankee troops. But in
the aftermath of a sudden—and in much of the South, unanticipated
—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic
—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic
a airs of places too smal or remote to warrant a detachment of
northern troops. In the Deep South, that meant nearly everyplace
outside state capitals and economic centers.
The result, in the two years preceding Henry and Mary's wedding,
was a spreading wave of internecine violence and thievery by
returning Confederate soldiers, particularly against those
southerners who had doubted the war. Deserters, who had been far
more numerous than southern mythology acknowledged, began
set ling old scores. The increasing lawlessness of the postwar years
was, rather than a wave of crime by freed slaves as so often
claimed, largely perpetrated against whites by other whites.
The Cot ingham farm sat in the middle of this unrest. One gang of
deserters in Bibb County, made up of men believed to have
abandoned the armies of both the North and the South, cal ed
themselves the Uglies, and marauded through the countryside
during the war, robbing farms and threatening Confederate
supporters. Another gang inhabited the Yel ow Leaf swamp on the
border with adjoining Chilton County. A paramilitary band of men
near the town of Monteval o, cal ing itself Blackwel 's Cavalrymen,
hunted the countryside for Confederate deserters before the
southern surrender and continued as an outlaw gang after the war.
The group eventual y murdered a total of seventeen local men.
White lawlessness was so rampant in Shelby County that less than a
year before Henry and Mary's wedding, Union military o cials in
the Alabama capital threatened to send troops into the area to
restore peace.30
Chilton County had been a hotbed of such guerril a activity
throughout the war and emerged as a refuge for Confederate
deserters and southerners who remained loyal to the Union. A local
plantation owner, Capt. James Cobb, who had been sent home
from duty with the southern army due to poor health, was assigned
the task of breaking up the gangs of deserters. The e ort spawned
vendet as that would outlast the war. On June 3, 1865, nearly two
months after the surrender, Cobb was seized by a group of thirty
whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they
whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they
ransacked his home, kil ing or stealing his livestock. The former
Confederate o cer was accused of having named seven of the
mob's members as deserters. The Blackwel group subsequently
captured the seven and summarily executed them.31
Of the handful of Union soldiers sent to Bibb County to oversee a
nominal local court system during the rst two years after the war,
one was kil ed on a Centrevil e street corner by a Confederate
veteran wielding an axe handle.32 Two agents of the Freedmen's
Bureau were assigned to the area in January and February of 1866.
The men, named Beard and Higgen-botham, were promptly
whipped by local whites and driven from the county. Not long
after, rumor spread that two former slaves named Tom Johnson
and Rube Russel had been seen around the county sporting ne
clothes paid for by Freedmen's Bureau agents. The emancipated
slaves planned to "live like white folks and marry white wives,"
according to a newspaper account. Johnson was promptly hanged
from a tree on Market Street. A few mornings later, passersby found
Russel dangling dead, in a tree not far from the scene of the earlier
lynching.33
Yet even as southern whites like those in Bibb County made their
rejection of the new order so apparent, no alternative was clear
either. The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the
Cot inghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with
scores or hundreds of slaves, not just nancial y but intel ectual y
bereft. The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cot on
production on most farms; in many cases it was slaves who directed
the gangs of other slaves in their daily work. Slavery had been
introduced into the southern colonies in the 1600s with the
argument that whites, operating alone, were incapable of large-
scale cot on production. The concepts of sharecropping and farm
tenancy hadn't yet evolved. The notion that their farms could be
operated in some manner other than with groups of black laborers
compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as
compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as
twenty hours a day was antithetical to most whites.
Moreover, the sudden wil ingness of mil ions of black laborers to
insolently demand cash wages and other requirements to secure
their labor was an almost otherworldly experience for whites such
as Elisha
Cot ingham. Former slaves were suddenly mobile too,
seeking new lodging away from the farms of their slave lives and
at empting to put white farmers into competition with one another
for their work.
In the absence of any means to supply freed slaves with land, the
Freed-men's Bureau and northern military commanders stationed in
the South encouraged blacks to enter into labor contracts with
whites. The results were writ en agreements between whites and
black farmhands l ed with provisions aimed at restoring the
subjugated state of African Americans. One agent of the Freedmen's
Bureau wrote that whites were unable to fathom that work "could
be accomplished without some prodigious binding and obligating
of the hireling to the employer."34
Some white plantation owners at empted to coerce their former
slaves into signing "lifetime contracts" to work on the farms. In one
South Carolina case in 1865, when four freedmen refused such
agreements, two were kil ed and a third, a woman, was tortured.35
More common were year-to-year contracts that obligated black
workers to remain throughout a planting and harvest season to
receive their ful pay, and under which they agreed to
extraordinarily onerous limitations on personal freedom that
echoed slave laws in e ect before emancipation. They agreed not to
leave the landowner's property without a writ en pass, not to own
rearms, to obey al commands of the farmer or his overseer, to
speak in a servile manner, and in the event of a violation of the
rules to accept whatever punishment the farmer deemed
appropriate—often the lash.36 Most of the early contracts adopted
in the South in 1865 and 1866 were dissolved by commanders of
the occupying Union troops. But they framed a strategy that
southern whites would return to again and again.
southern whites would return to again and again.
When Elisha's sons arrived home from the war, they found only
the barest gleanings of the earlier time with which to restart their
lives. The thriving farmland world of their boyhoods no longer
existed. After four years of steadily in ated Confederate scrip, now
entirely worthless, the value of a man's land and tools, even of a
bale of cot on, was nearly unknowable. Elisha's property was worth
the substantial sum of nearly $20,000 before the war. The great
bulk of that was invested in his slaves, and now they were his no