Slavery by Another Name
Page 7
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
and during the war. The extraordinary value of organizing a gang of
slave men to quickly accomplish an arduous manual task—such as
enlarging a mine and extracting its contents, or constructing
railroads through the most inhospitable frontier regions—became
obvious during the manpower shortages of wartime.
Critical to the success of this form of slavery was dispensing with
any pretense of the mythology of the paternalistic agrarian slave
owner. Labor here was more akin to a source of fuel than an
extension of a slave owner's familial circle. Even on the harshest of
family-operated antebel um farms, slave masters could not help but
be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human
be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human
a ections that close contact with slave families inevitably
manifested.
But in the set ing of industrial slavery—where only strong young
males and a tiny number of female "washerwomen" and cooks were
acquired, and no semblance of family interaction was possible—
slaves were assets to be expended like mules and equipment. By
the early 1860s, such slavery was commonplace in the areas of the
most intensive comme
rcial farming in Mississippi and parts of
Alabama.
It was a model particularly wel suited to mining and rst
aggressively exploited in high-intensity cot on production, in which
individual skil was not necessarily more important than brute
strength. In those set ings, black labor was something to be
consumed, with a clear comprehension of return on investment.
Food, housing, and physical care were bot om-line accounting
considerations in a formula of pro t and loss, weighed primarily in
terms of their e ect on chat el slave productivity rather than
plantation harmony.
On the enormous cot on plantations unfolding in the antebel um
years across the malarial wasteland of the Mississippi Delta,
absentee owners routinely left overseers in charge of smal armies
of slaves. In an economic formula in which there was no pretense
of paternalistic protection for slaves, the overseers drove them
mercilessly.
Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through the South prior to the
Civil War, wrote of the massive plantations of Alabama and
Mississippi as places where black men and women "work harder
and more unremit ingly" than the rest of slave country. "As
property, Negro life and Negro vigor were general y much less
encouraged than I had always before imagined them to be."7
Another observer of Mississippi farms said that on the new
plantations "everything has to bend, give way to large crops of
cot on, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, Negroes to work hot or
cold."8 Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that
cold." Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that
black laborers would also die quickly9 "The Negroes die o every
few years, though it is said that in time each hand also makes
enough to buy two more in his place," wrote planter James H.
Ruf in in 1833.10
An English traveler visiting the great plantations in the nal years
of slavery described African Americans who "from the moment they
are able to go a eld in the picking season til they drop worn out
in the grave in incessant labor, in al sorts of weather, at al seasons
of the year without any change or relaxation than is furnished by
sickness, without the smal est hope of any improvement either in
their condition, in their food, or in their clothing indebted solely to
the forbearance and good temper of the overseer for exemption
from terrible physical suf ering."11
Even large-scale slave owners who directed their business
managers to provide reasonable care for slaves nonetheless
advocated harsh measures to maintain the highest level of
production. "They must be ogged as seldom as possible yet always
when necessary," wrote one.12
An overseer's goal, a Delta planter said, was "to get as much work
out of them as they can possibly perform. His skil consists in
knowing exactly how hard they may be driven without
incapacitating them for future exertion. The larger the plantation,
the less chance there is, of course, of the owner's softening the rigor
of the overseer, or the sternness of discipline by personal
interference."13
Scip saw those changes coming. In the 1830s, a water-driven
cot on mil was constructed on a creek seven miles north of the
county seat, not far from the Cot ingham plantation.14 Employing
several dozen white laborers , the mil ginned cot on and spun it
into thread and rope. Of far more portent for Scip's future, and that
of his descendants, had been a chance discovery in the 1820s by a
white set ler named Jonathan Newton Smith. On a hunting trip
near the Cahaba, Smith was surprised when large stones pul ed
from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped
from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped
across the massive deposits of coal abounding in Alabama, and over
the next fty years would be a pioneering exploiter of the
serendipitous proximity of immense brown iron ore deposits
scat ered across the ridges and, beneath the surface, the perfect fuel
for blasting the ore into iron and steel.15 It was a combination that
would transform life in Alabama, reshaping Scip's last years of
slavery and radical y altering the lives of mil ions of individuals
over the next century.
Smith ambitiously assembled thousands of acres of land
containing mineral deposits, and by 1840, he and others had
opened smal iron forges on al sides of the Cot ingham farm. One
was built on Six Mile Creek, a few miles down the mail road
toward the nearest set lement. Another was across the Cahaba River.
A third was constructed on a tributary of the big river just north of
the plantation.16 These were crude mechanical enterprises, belching
great columns of foul smoke and rivers of e uent. But they were
marvels of the frontier in which they suddenly appeared. A giant
water-powered wheel rst crushed the iron ore, which was fed into
a stone furnace and heated into a huge red molten mass. The
"hammer man," working in nearly unbearable heat and using a red-
hot bar of metal as his tool, then maneuvered the molten iron onto
an anvil where a ve-hundred-pound hammer, also powered by the
waterwheel, pounded it into bars. Primitive as was the mechanism,
the rough-edged masses of iron were the vital raw material for
blacksmiths in every town and on every large farm to craft into the
plows, horseshoes, and implements that were the civilizing tools of
the Alabama frontier.17
In addition to Smith, two other white men living near the
Cot ingham farm, Jonathan Ware and his son Horace, were
aggressively expanding the infant industry18 To Smith's geological
observations, Horace Ware, a native of Lynn, Massachuset s, brought
a keen instinct for the market among southern cot on planters for
local y forged iron. He had learned the iron trade from his father,
and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of
and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of
iron ore in 1841. He put his first furnace into blast in 1846.19
Slaves were the primary workers at the earliest recorded coal
mines in Alabama in the 1830s. Moses Stroup, the "father" of the
iron and steel industry in Alabama, arrived in the state in 1848,
acquired land on Red Mountain just south of present-day
Birmingham, and erected his rst furnaces. By the early 1850s, he
was constructing a much larger group of furnaces in Tuscaloosa
County, entirely with slave labor.20
Indeed, nearly al of the early industrial locations of the South
were constructed by such slaves, thousands of whom became skil ed
masons, miners, blacksmiths, pat ern makers, and furnace workers.
Slaves performed the overwhelming majority of the raw labor of
such operations, working as l ers, who shoveled iron ore,
limestone, and coal into the furnaces in careful y monitored
sequence; gut ermen, who drew o the molten iron as it gathered;
tree cut ers, who fel ed mil ions of trees, and teamsters to drive
heads.21Alabama's rst recorded industrial fatality was a slave
named Vann, kil ed in the early 1840s by fal ing rock in an iron ore
pit near Alabama's earliest known forge.22
Southern railroads also became voracious acquirers of slaves,
purchasing them by the hundreds and leasing them from others for
as much as $20 per month in the 1850s.23 By the beginning of the
Civil War, railroads owned an estimated twenty thousand slaves.24
Al of the early iron masters of the region relied on slaves for the
grueling menial work of clearing their property, constructing hand-
hewn stone and brick furnaces and forges, and gathering the ore
and coal exposed on outcrops or near the surface.25 As the forges
went into production, slaves were trained to perform the arduous
tasks of the blast furnace. Quickly, the Wares and other budding
industrialists began a tra c in the specialized category of slaves
trained in the skil s of making iron.
During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a
During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a
businessman in Georgia a slave named Joe. Five years later,
Jonathan Smith purchased the slave at auction for $3,000, and set
him to work as the hammer man in one of his Bibb County
forges.26 By the late 1850s, the Wares, having shifted their iron-
making operations to adjoining Shelby County, operated the largest
metal works in the Deep South, largely with skil ed slaves. Horace
Ware's son, John E. Ware, would later reminisce about the most
valued slaves at the forge. He recal ed that "Berry, Charles,
Anderson, Clark and Obediah" held key positions.27
The Hale & Murdock Furnace near Vernon, Alabama, was built in
1859 and then dramatical y expanded to meet war needs in 1862
by a force of 150 men, most of whom were slaves.28 In December
1862, a Montgomery businessman began work on an iron ore mine
and furnace north of the Cane Creek forge using a force of two
hundred slaves moved from Tennessee as federal forces advanced
from the North.29 Shortly after the operation was ful y under way,
Union general Wilson's raiders wrecked it.
In 1860, a year before the Civil War erupted, Jonathan Smith
launched his most ambitious e ort ever, the enormous ironworks at
Brier eld, less than nine miles from the Cot ingham farm. A partner