Slavery by Another Name

Home > Other > Slavery by Another Name > Page 2
Slavery by Another Name Page 2

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  It overlooked many of the most signi cant dimensions of the new forced labor,

  including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to

  suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and

  the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of

  African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and

  tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from

  political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or

  forced labor camps. The judges and sheri s who sold convicts to giant

  corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans

  to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to

  acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because

  most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to

  each southern state, they minimized the collective e ect of the decisions by

  hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this

  period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

  I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of

  the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward

  blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial

  views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—

  seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the

  speci c decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans

  were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S.

  society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black

  Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people

  still not free fty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the e ects of

  cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation

  rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of

  repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new

  generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and

  resources.

  Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage

  sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original

  documents and personal narratives revealing a very di erent version of events.

  In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest

  to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans

  into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty

  thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the les of the Department

  of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure

  entries in the public record o er details of a forced labor system of

  monotonous enormity.

  Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over

  decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands

  of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of

  probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this

  net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than

  twice that gure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original

  records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential

  charges or for violations of laws speci cally written to intimidate blacks—

  changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a

  ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women.

  Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to

  rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of

  crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the

  South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-

  time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers

  became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob

  violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return

  of forced labor as a xture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives

  of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in

  which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete

  racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically

  chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible

  forces of tradition and history.

  By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly recon gured to make

  one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with

  the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that

  1901 also marked the nal full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks

  throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local

  mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white

  business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments.

  Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were

  rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured

  the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama,

  Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South

  Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United

  States then lived.

  It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth

  century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to ourish

  in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with

  thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories

  and mines in the 1850s were also the rst to employ forced African American

  labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing

  slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves,

  and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict

  leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment

  employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against

  "slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed

  such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These

  were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that su ocated the

  aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached

  the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an

  explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin

  much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of

  his life.

  Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the

  rising southern white assault on black independence—even as black leaders

  increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for

  help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of

  white Americans, exhau
sted from the long debates over the role of blacks in

  U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have

  to accept the end of freedom.

  On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the

  White House from Carrie Kinsey a barely literate African American woman in

  Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been

  abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no

  interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the

  illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing

  for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast

  majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at

  the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case

  12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the

  National Archives.

  A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—

  was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of

  blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or

  African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not

  fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound

  global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the rst time

  since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior

  to the Civil War.

  That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow

  of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to

  the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of

  millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era.

  Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate,

  comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that

  enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve

  their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the

  United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast

  majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive.

  There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a

  Pratt Mines burial eld. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their

  existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

  That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book—

  especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most

  interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented

  details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the

  place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story

  gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common

  slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves

  versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced

  labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had

  been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he

  produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that

  steeped the place and era of Green Cot-tenham's birth; of the obliterating

  forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could

  the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single,

  anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and

  unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's

  most authentic and compelling dimension.

  Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the

  boundaries of the burial eld, considering even without bene t of his words

  the sti ed horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended

  through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that

  Cottenham belonged as the central gure of this narrative. The slavery that

  survived long past emancipation was an o ense permitted by the nation,

  perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving

  thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but

  every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every

  direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the

  time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what

  happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to

  orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of

  the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black

  man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this

  book.

  I

  THE WEDDING

  Fruits of Freedom

  Freedom wasn't yet three years old when the wedding day came.

  Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop had been chat el slaves until

  the momentous nal days of the Civil War, as nameless in the

  eyes of the law as cows in the eld. Al their lives, they could no

  more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a

  wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a nal

  furious sweep of Union soldiers—in a bewildering blur of

  liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war—ravaged the

  Cahaba River val ey.

  Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no

  more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr,

  the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his

  Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation

  of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people

  that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.

  To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly

  seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry.

  In every direction from the Cot ingham Loop, the simple dirt road

  alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their

  former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bit er.

  The val ey, the undulating hil s of Bibb County, even the bridges

  and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down

  from the last foothil s of the Appalachians and into the at fertile

  plains to the south, were stil wrecked from the savage cavalry raids

  of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April

  1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in bil owing

  swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scat ered

  before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius

  Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

  Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

  war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last

  functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama

  in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the val ey

  remained a twisted ruin. Fal ow elds. Burned barns. Machinery

/>   rusting at the bot oms of wel s. Horses and mules dead or lost. The

  people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.

  From the front porch of Elisha Cot ingham's house, two stories

  stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the

  river's edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren

  vista. The land had long ago lost nearly al resemblance to the

  massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fty

  years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of

  its careful y tended bounty of the last years before the war.

  He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded

  from the house in one long sheet of soil, fal ing gradual y away

  from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly ve hundred yards,

  the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when

  Elisha rst arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and

  south, the great eld was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up

  over turtle-shel shapes of limestone protruding from the banks,

  growing deeper and wider, fal ing faster and more furiously—strong

  enough to spin a smal grist mil —before it turned to the west and

  suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cot ing-

  ham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the

  place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a

  resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.

  Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cot ingham, like countless

  other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of

  an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times

  constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society

  they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and

  humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for

  generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical

  spectrum of possibilities for what might yet fol ow, Elisha had to

  consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

  consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

  human e ort invested at the con uence of Cot ingham Creek and

  the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their

  achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last

  Cot ingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave

 

‹ Prev