Slavery by Another Name

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by Douglas A. Blackmon


  more. The Cot inghams had not even the cash to buy cot on seed

  and corn, much less the labor of the former slaves they had so

  recently owned.

  In February 1868, Elisha, perhaps sensing his own mortality more

  acutely in the postwar chaos, began dividing much of the plantation

  among his four sons, John, James, Moses, and Harry37 At the same

  time, his daughter, Rebecca Bat le, bought two hundred acres of the

  property for $600.38

  Later that month, Moses Cot ingham borrowed $120 from a

  cot on buyer in the town of Randolph, an outpost in the other end

  of the county on the edge of the wide-open cot on lands of southern

  Alabama. For col ateral, Moses promised two ve-hundred-pound

  bales of cot on at the end of the season.39 From another man, he

  borrowed $120, securing that note with one six-year-old mule and a

  ten-year-old horse.40 The fol owing January, 1869, Moses borrowed

  again, mortgaging for $150 his ever older horse and three other

  mules. The crop that fal wouldn't be enough to pay o the loan,

  and Moses couldn't clear his debt until 1871.41

  A sense of paralysis was pervasive among whites. Elias Bishop, a

  prosperous farmer with a spread of several hundred acres under

  plow in another rich bend of the Cahaba downstream from the

  Cot inghams, was in similar straits. In the fal of 1869, Bishop,

  South Carolina-born and another of the county's earliest set lers,

  borrowed a lit le more than $50 against one hundred bushels of

  corn and mortgaged a portion of his land for $37.60. He never paid

  it back.42 The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

  it back. The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

  against two bales of cot on from John C. Henry, the cot on buyer at

  Randolph who had become the county's de facto banker and

  nancier. She set led the debt after the harvest of 1870, but

  immediately had to assume another loan.43

  The Bishops, like Elisha and his family, were devout Wesleyan

  Methodists.44 Along with their slaves, the Bishops had at ended the

  Mount Zion church near their farm in the south end of the county,

  where the family lived in a house over owing with daughters.45

  The Bishops and Cot inghams, white and black, would have known

  each other wel through the close-knit circles of the Methodist

  circuit. John Wesley Starr, as a circuit-riding clergyman, was a

  regular feature before both congregations. Elias Bishop had

  accumulated an even more impressive col ection of slaves than

  Elisha, with ten black men and three black females old enough to

  work in the elds at the beginning of the war. A half dozen young

  children rounded out the slave quarters. On the day of

  emancipation in 1863, the Bishop slave girl named Mary, who ve

  years later would become Henry Cot inham's wife, was fourteen.46

  In the wake of the war, one episode in the lives of white

  Cot inghams became the de ning anecdote of the family's su ering

  and resurrection. Elisha's son Moses, who had migrated to Bienvil e

  Parish, Louisiana, a few years before secession, lost his land and the

  life of his wife, and had been forced to send his children on a

  harrowing journey through the bat le zones of Mississippi with only

  a slave and a geriatric preacher to protect them. The saga resonated

  through generations of white Cot inghams and blacks descended

  from their slaves.

  After Moses enlisted in January 1862, his pregnant wife, Nancy

  Katherine, grew il and then died during childbirth. Moses returned

  home from the front to bury Nancy and make arrangements for

  their six surviving children. Elisha Cot ingham sent a Baptist

  minister to Louisiana to bring his grandchildren back to Alabama

  for the duration of the war. With the southern railroad system

  already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

  already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

  the preacher and one of Moses’ two slaves, Joe, set out in an ox-

  drawn wagon. "That was the hardest trial I had ever had to go

  through, to leave my lit le children to be carried o to Alabama,"

  Moses recounted to descendants years later.47

  For three weeks, the odd expedition inched across the war-

  disrupted South. The preacher and the old African American, a

  scramble of children foraging for turnips and cornmeal, the oldest

  daughter, Cirrenia, stil a child herself, feeding two-month-old

  Johnny, the infant whose birth had kil ed their mother, with a gruel

  of baked sweet potatoes. In November 1862, the ragged band

  arrived at Elisha Cot ingham's farm on the Cahaba River. The fate of

  Moses, stil at war, was unknown. "We never knew whether he was

  dead or alive til one day, after the war was over, we saw him

  coming," Cirrenia later wrote. Moses started over, reset ling on

  nearby land along Copperas Creek, marrying the daughter of

  another former slaveholding family and beget ing another seven

  children.

  The losses su ered by Moses and the slow rescue of his family in

  the heat of war could have been a parable for how white

  southerners perceived the destruction of the South they had known.

  Physical and nancial devastation, death and grief, fol owed by a

  transforming struggle to survive and rebuild. But the story also

  underscored the terrifying vulnerability whites like the Cot inghams

  discovered in being forced to place the fate and future of Moses’

  family in the hands of a descendant of Africa. After the war, as the

  Cot ingham slaves brazenly asserted their independence, the

  journey of Joe and the children across the South came to symbolize

  a reliance on blacks that southern whites could never again al ow.

  Regardless of their intertwined pasts, the rehabilitation of the South

  by whites would not just purposeful y exclude blacks. As time

  passed and opportunity permit ed, former slaves would be

  compel ed to perform the rebuilding of the South as wel — in a

  system of labor hardly distinguishable in its brutality and coercion

  from the old slavery that preceded it.

  If one looked out from Elisha's porch in December 1868, across the

  crop rows and down past the creek, the only green in a nearly

  colorless winter landscape was in the short scru y needles of

  twisted cedars he had planted long ago, along the wagon drive from

  the road to the house. The slave cabins, nearly two dozen of them,

  were mostly empty now. Even Scipio, the old man slave who had

  worked Elisha's farm nearly as long as the white master himself,

  was gone down the road. Already, weather and uselessness were

  doing the shacks in.

  Crisp brown leaves heaped at the feet of a line of high pines and

  bare hickories that framed the boundaries of the main eld

  between the river and the house. The wal s of yel ow limestone

  rising up abruptly from the eastern bank of the Cahaba looked pale

  and gray.

  The big eld, long devoid of its hardwood forest, was striped

  with lifeless rows of cot on stalks and corn husks standing against

  the low, sharp-angled rays of win
ter sun. In every direction,

  thousands of bedraggled slips of lint stil clung to broken cot on

  bol s—wisps of that portion of the harvest that time and weather

  and, in Elisha's mind, the obstinancy of "his Negroes" had conspired

  to leave behind. Al winter long they would hang there, limp and

  wet, layering the dead elds with a hazy whisper of white and

  goading Elisha Cot ingham in their waste.

  How di erently lay the land for Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop.

  They had been reared on farms within a night's walk of the plain

  country church where now they would marry, and the hil s and

  elds and forests fanning out from the Cahaba eastward along Six

  Mile Road had been the width and range of life to these two slaves.

  Contrasted against that circumscribed existence, the extraordinary

  events in the aftermath of emancipation—no mat er the deprivation

  or arduousness—must have been bathed in a glow of wonder and

  astonishment.

  It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

  It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

  civilized the Cahaba val ey and al of rugged central Alabama. Bibb

  County was a place where there were no at places. A freshly

  cleared tract of forest ground displayed a roiling surface of earth, a

  scene more like swel s pitching in a rol ing sea than elds

  beckoning the plow. It was the rst generation of slaves, like

  Scipio, who hacked and burned the woods, sawing down the great

  virgin forests, digging out and dragging away the stumps and stones

  left behind, breaking by plow for the rst time the rich, root-

  infested soil, smoothing and shaping the land for seed. For the

  generations of slaves that fol owed, it was the traces of a mule-

  drawn plow that de-marked the boundaries of hour upon hour

  spent restraining the iron blade from plunging down hil sides or

  struggling to drive it up the impossible inclines that fol owed.

  As wel as Scipio and the black families that surrounded him had

  come to know the shape and contours of the Cot ingham farm,

  never, until wel into the years of war, had they even imagined the

  possibility that they could someday own the land, grow their own

  harvests, perhaps even control the government. Now, al those

  things, or some luminous variant of them, seemed not just possible

  but perhaps inevitable.

  Whatever bit erness Elisha Cot ingham carried on the day of

  Henry and Mary's wedding must have been more than surpassed by

  the joy of the plantation's oldest former slave, Scipio, the

  grandfather of Henry. Almost seventy years old yet as robust as a

  man a third his age, Scip, as he was cal ed, had witnessed near

  unearthly transformations of the world as he knew it. He had been

  born in Africa, then wrenched as a child into the frontier of an

  America only faintly removed from its eighteenth-century colonial

  origins. Through decades spent clearing forest and planting virgin

  elds, he watched as the unclaimed Indian land on which he found

  himself evolved into a yet even more foreign place. In the early

  years of the Cot ingham farm, Cherokee and Creek Indians stil

  control ed the western bank of the Cahaba's sister stream, the Coosa

  River. Choctaw territory extended to within fty miles of the

  plantation.48 Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

  plantation. Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

  receded, and the frontier outposts swel ed into set lements and then

  lit le, aspiration- l ed towns. As the Civil War years approached,

  the Cot ingham plantation fel nal y into a steady rhythm of

  stability and cot on-driven prosperity.

  Whether the child who came to be a Cot ingham slave cal ed

  Scipio knew the speci c place of his origins, who his parents were,

  what African people they were a part of, how they came to be

  compel ed across the Atlantic and into slavery—what his native

  name had been—al was lost.

  The erasure of his history was completed by the moniker placed

  on him by white captors. Scipio was a classic slave name, one of a

  catalogue of cynical, almost sneering, designations rooted in the

  white South's popular fetish for the mythology of the classic

  cultures. It came from the name of a second-century general who

  governed Rome as Scipio Africanus. For the Roman Scipio, this was

  a tribute to his victory over Hannibal in the year 201, extending

  Roman control over Carthage and al of northern Africa. His reign

  had also seen the brutal suppression of the rst great Roman slave

  revolt, in which on one occasion more than twenty thousand

  rebel ing slaves were cruci ed. The context of such a name might

  have been lost on an African slave barred from learning Western

  history, but to educated whites the mocking irony would have been

  obvious.49

  Scipio at least knew that he had been born in Africa, unlike

  nearly every other slave that entered the Cot ingham farm, and that

  he believed the year of his birth was 1802. Perhaps he came

  directly to Cot ingham from an Atlantic slave ship. Possibly he was

  rst enslaved in Virginia or North Carolina, and then resold to the

  Deep South in the great domestic slave trading boom of the early

  nineteenth century. Shipping manifests at the port of New Orleans

  contain an entry for a teenage slave boy named Scipio arriving from

  a plantation in Virginia in 1821. Whatever his origins, Scip would

  hold de antly until the end of his life to his identity as an Africa-

  born black man.50

  born black man.

  Even bound into the agony of a quotidian life of forced labor,

  Scip must have conversely thril ed to the rise of the bountiful tribe

  of men and women who sprang from his Atlantic passage. The

  white people who brought him here had purchased other slaves,

  particularly in his boyhood, and housed them in the quarter of log-

  and-mud cabins down the hil from Elisha's house. But since Scip

  had grown to manhood, it was he who had sired slave after slave.

  First came George in 1825 (who would become the father of

  Henry) and Jef in 1828. Then, in 1830, arrived Green, whose likely

  namesake, born more than fty years later, would be delivered to

  Slope No. 12 mine in 1908.

  They were al sturdy boys, and as much as any man might expect

  in a hard life. But in the nal years before the Civil War, Scip

  surprised any of the other freed slaves who might have thought old

  age was set ing upon him. He took up with Charity, a teenage girl

  almost forty years his junior. Whether the union was coerced or by

  choice, it was consummated in slavery and continued in a sweet

  freedom. Charity would stay with Scip until the end of his long life,

  deep into the years of emancipation, and for nearly twenty years

  bear to him sons and daughters with the regularity of cot on bol s

  and swol en spring streams.

  Years before emancipation, Scip had seen the rst signs of the

  epochal transformation about to infuse his world. Exotic new

  enterprises began to appear in the former frontier of Bibb County.

>   On creeks surrounding the Cot ingham farm, smal forges were built

  in the 1830s, early precursors to the massive steel and iron industry

  that would come to dominate Alabama by the end of the century. In

  1850, at a location a few miles from the Cot-tinghams’, a massive

  boiler-driven sawmil began operation, pumping from the stil

  virgin forests a fantastic stream of sawn planks and timbers. More

  ominously, Bibb Steam Mil Company also introduced to the county

  the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so

  important as the Civil War loomed.

  The mil acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly

  al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

  al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

  barracks on its property. The Cot ingham slave cabins would have

  seemed luxurious in contrast.51

  The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named Wil iam S.

  Philips, John W. Lopsky Archibald P. McCurdy and Virgil H.

  Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of

  timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmil to cut lumber

  and grind corn and our. 52 In addition to the two dozen slaves,

  Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from

  nearby farms during its busiest periods of work.

  The signi cance of those evolutions wouldn't have been lost on a

  slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of

  slave leasing was already a xture of southern life. Farm production

  was by its nature an ine cient cycle of labor, with intense periods

  of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during

  the months of "laid-by" time in the summer, and then another great

  burst of harvest activity in the fal and early winter, fol owed nal y

  by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to

  maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new

  opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the

  most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

  Given al that had changed in Bibb County in the years leading

  up to the southern rebel ion, it would have been no surprise to the

  old slave that he found himself during the war in the service of the

  Confederacy, making iron for cannons and rebel ships in the

  ironworks at Brierfield.

  Perhaps it was a comfort to Scip that joining him at Brier eld

 

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