Slavery by Another Name
Page 5
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