Slavery by Another Name (9 page)

Green. Henry would raise up the o spring of the land and of his

blood.

Surely, that was freedom.

I

AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

"Niggers is cheap."

Across the South, white southerners were ba ed. What to do with

.freed slaves like Henry Cot inham and his grandfather Scip?

They could not be driven away. Without former slaves—and

their steady expertise and cooperation in the elds—the white

South was crippled. But this new manifestation of dark-skinned

men expected to choose when, where, and how long they would

work. Those who could not nd employ wandered town to town,

presumptuously asking for food, favors, and jobs.

To get from place to place, or to reach locations where work had

been advertised, they piled onto the empty freight cars of what few

trains stil ran. They formed up at night around camp res in the

shadows of train depots and cot on warehouses on the fringes of

towns. In the face of hostile whites—the Ku Klux Klan and members

of other suddenly ourishing secret white societies—they

brandished guns and were wil ing to use them. Beyond gal to their

former masters, these meandering swarms of il iterate men also

expected to be al owed to vote.

The breadth of white venom toward freed slaves—and the

decades of venality that fol owed it—belied the wide spectrum of

perspectives on slavery shared by white southerners before the war.

From the earliest years of the North American colonies, whites

struggled to resolve vastly di ering views even among slaveholders

of the place and position of blacks in the new society.

Colonial America began as a place uncertain of the abject

subjugation of native Indian populations and thousands of African

slaves pouring into the Western Hemisphere. Many were perplexed

by the concept of categorizing humans by race and skin color,

versus the long-standing European tradition of identi cation rooted

in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of

in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of

colonization in the 1600s, "slave" and "Negro" were not synonymous

in the American colonies. Slaves were as likely to be Indians as

Africans. Some early owners of black slaves were themselves black.

Free Africans in Virginia were permit ed to vote wel into the

1700s. Many indentured white servants were coerced into extending

their labor contracts until death—e ectively making them light-

skinned slaves.

Dispel ing that confusion and ensuring the dominant position of

whites in general—and Englishmen in particular—colonial

legislatures, especial y in Virginia, South Carolina, and, later,

Georgia, began in the 1650s to systematical y de ne residents by

color and lineage. The intentions were twofold: to create the legal

structure necessary for building an economy with cheap slave labor

as its foundation, and secondly, to reconcile bondage with America's

revolutionary ideals of intrinsic human rights. Blacks could be

excluded from the Enlightenment concepts that every man was

granted by God individual freedom and a right to the pursuit of

happiness because colonial laws codi ed a less-than-ful y-human

status of any person carrying even a trace of black or Indian blood.

Instead of embracing the concept that regardless of color "Al men

are created equal," with no king or prince born to higher status than

any other, colonial leaders extended a version of "royal" status to al

whites.

Stil , vast swaths of the region, including the rock-strewn

Appalachians stretching from northern Alabama, across Georgia,

and up through the Carolinas and Virginia, contained virtual y no

slaves at al . Indeed, in some of those places, companies of men had

gathered after secession, armed themselves, and marched north to

join with the Union armies moving upon the South.

In other places, men who owned hundreds or thousands of slaves

nonetheless wrestled without resolution with the subtle moralities

of human bondage and the tra cking of men. Robert Wickli e,

owner of more slaves than any other person in Kentucky and likely

anyone in the United States, argued passionately against the

exportation of slaves from the coastal regions of the United States

exportation of slaves from the coastal regions of the United States

to the comparative horrors of Deep South plantations in Georgia

and Mississippi. The 1860 census counted among four mil ion

blacks in the South more than 250,000 free African Americans in

the slave states, more than fty thousand of them in Virginia. In

Louisiana, a handful of black freedmen owned dozens of slaves. In

the intricately hued tapestry of New Orleans, more than three

thousand free blacks owned slaves themselves.1

But in what came to be known as the Black Belt—a long curve of

mostly al uvial cot on farmland stretching across the fertile atlands

ranging from South Carolina through the lower reaches of Georgia

and Alabama, and then extending across Mississippi and Louisiana

—antebel um society had been built whol y on true chat el slavery.

Mil ions of slaves came to live there under the ruthless control of a

minority of whites. Here, the moral rationalization of slavery—and

the view of slaves as the essential proof of white men's royal status

—became as fundamental to whites’ perception of America as the

concept of liberty itself. A century later, this was the paradox of the

post-Civil War South—recognition of freed slaves as ful humans

appeared to most white southerners not as an extension of liberty

but as a violation of it, and as a chal enge to the legitimacy of their

definition of what it was to be white.

The destruction of slavery in the Civil War didn't set le this

contradiction. Instead, it made more transparent the fundamental

question of whether blacks and whites could ever cohabit

peaceful y—of whether American whites in any region could

recognize African Americans as humans. Faced with the mandated

equality of whites and blacks, the range of southern perspectives on

race distil ed to narrow potency. Even among those who had been

troubled by—or apathetic toward—slavery before the war, there

was scant sympathy for the concept of ful equality. By

overwhelming majorities, whites adopted an assessment of the

black man paral el to that in the great crescent of cot on country.

The Civil War set led de nitively the question of the South's

continued existence as a part of the United States, but in 1865 there

was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and

was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and

intel ectual addiction to slavery. The resistance to what should have

been the obvious consequences of losing the Civil War—ful

emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between

blacks and whites—was so virulent and e ective that the tangible

outcome of the military struggle between the North and the South

remained uncertain even twenty- ve years after the issuance of

President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The role

of the African American in American society would not be clear for

another one hundred years.

In the rst decades of that span, the intensity of southern whites’

need to reestablish hegemony over blacks rivaled the most visceral

patriotism of the wartime Confederacy. White southerners initiated

an extraordinary campaign of de ance and subversion against the

new biracial social order imposed on the South and mandated by

the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which

abolished slavery. They organized themselves into vigilante gangs

and militias, undermined free elections across the region,

intimidated Union agents, terrorized black leaders, and waged an

extremely e ective propaganda campaign to place blame for the

anarchic behavior of whites upon freed slaves. As the United States

would learn many times in the ensuing 150 years, a military victor's

intention to impose a new moral and political code on a conquered

society was much easier to wish for than to at ain.

Bibb County, home of the Cot inghams, was edged on the south by

that great fertile prairie of plantation country where by the 1850s

slaves accounted for the majority of most local populations. Bibb

whites harbored no equivocation about the proper status of African

Americans in their midst. There had been no agonized sentiment of

doubt in this section of Alabama regarding the morality of

slaveholding. No abolitionist voices arose here. In the 1840s, when

the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Church

divided over the issue of slavery, its Bibb County congregations—

certainly including Cot ingham Chapel—emphatical y went the way

certainly including Cot ingham Chapel—emphatical y went the way

of the southern church.2

There were no free blacks there before the war. The explosion in

slave numbers in the adjoining counties—where tens of thousands

of black men and women populated plantations strung along the

Tennessee, Alabama, and Tombigbee rivers—o ered a huge

inventory of readily available African Americans and sustained a

thriving local traf ic in slaves.3

In Montgomery, the state capital seventy miles from the Bibb

County seat, a huge wholesale market in slaves preoccupied the

commercial life of the bustling city. Richard Habersham, a Georgian

traveling through the town in 1836, described a sprawling slave

market with scores of black men and women and crowds of white

men closely inspecting them. "I came suddenly upon ranges of wel

dressed Negro men and women seated upon benches. There may

have been 80 or 100 al in di erent parcels…. With each group

were seated two or three sharp, hard featured white men. This was

the slave market and the Negroes were dressed out for show. There

they sit al day and every day until they are sold, each parcel rising

and standing in rank as a purchaser approaches. Although born in a

slave country and a slave holder myself and an advocate of slavery,

yet this sight was entirely novel and shocked my feelings."4 Twenty-

ve years later, three months after the opening of the Civil War, a

correspondent for the Times of London watched a twenty- ve-year-

old black man sold for less than $1,000 during a day of slow

bidding at the same market. "I tried in vain to make myself familiar

with the fact that I could for the sum of $975 become as absolutely

the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinew, esh, and brains as

of the horse which stood by my side," wrote W H. Russel . "It was

painful to see decent-looking men in European garb engaged in the

work before me…. The negro was sold to one of the bystanders and

walked o with his bundle God knows where. ‘Niggers is cheap,’

was the only remark."5

Elisha Cot ingham might have acquired Scipio at the Montgomery

market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between

market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between

the big urban slave markets at Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama.

They traveled the crude roads of the backcountry acquiring lots of

slaves and then pushing "droves" of them shackled together from

town to town. They pitched their tents in crossroads set lements to

showcase their wares, and paraded slaves before landowners in

need of labor.

During the 1850s, a man named J. M. Brown styled himself as

"not a planter but a Negro raiser," growing no cot on on his Bibb

County plantation but breeding slaves on his farm speci cal y for

sale on the open market.6 On the courthouse steps, Bibb County

sheri s routinely held slave auctions to pay o the unpaid taxes of

local landowners. County o cials authorized holding the sales on

either side of the Cahaba River for the convenience of potential

buyers in each section of the county.

The South's highly evolved system of seizing, breeding,

wholesaling, and retailing slaves was invaluable in the nal years

before the Civil War, as slavery proved in industrial set ings to be

more exible and dynamic than even most slave owners could have

otherwise believed.

Skil ed slaves such as Scipio, churning out iron, cannons, gun

metal, ri ed artil ery, bat le ships, and munitions at Selma, Shelby

Iron Works, and the Brier eld foundry, were only a sample of how

thousands of slaves had migrated into industrial set ings just before