from Montgomery, 54 faced charges of carrying a concealed weapon
and assault and bat ery. Guns carried by black men were becoming
an increasingly potent issue among white southerners. Across the
an increasingly potent issue among white southerners. Across the
South, but nowhere more intensely than in Alabama, public
campaigns were under way to ban the possession of firearms by any
African American. In an era when great numbers of southern men
carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—
enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the
century become one of the most consistent instruments of black
incarceration. The larger implications of disarming black men, at a
time when they were simultaneously being stripped of political and
legal protections, were transparent.
Gri n's assault, whatever it was, lit le interested the Bibb County
judge in 1881. He was convicted but ned only $1. On the charge
of carrying a weapon, however, the man faced a serious penalty.
Unable to pay the court a $50 ne and costs, Gri n instead was
forced by Judge Gardner to work at hard labor 188 and one half
days.55
Later that year, Judge Gardner presided over the case of Milton
Cot-tingham, one of the former slaves Elisha had watched come of
age on the banks of the Cahaba and likely another son of Scipio.
Milton was stil working a portion of the land he had farmed as a
slave for Elisha, though by 1880 he was a sharecropper on a plot
next to Rev. Starr's old home on the Cot-tingham Loop. Like Scip,
he had married after slavery to a woman half his age, and lived
with Julie and their two-year-old son, Gabe, just steps from the
slave cabins Milt had known as a boy.
On Hal oween day of 1881, Milton came before Judge Gardner,
charged with malicious mischief. The prosecutor was Thomas
Smither-man, the former judge. At issue was an al eged injury to
some cows owned by A. B. McIntosh.
Only the barest details of the accusation survive in court records,
but it was not uncommon in the South at the time for a white
landowner to accuse a tenant farmer of overworking or otherwise
harming a mule or cow furnished along with the land. Ostensible
injuries to the livestock could be another basis for landowners to
withhold additional amounts from their sharecroppers when it
withhold additional amounts from their sharecroppers when it
came time to set le accounts at the end of the year. Whatever the
specifics in Milt Cot ingham's case, he pleaded not guilty.
Judge Gardner heard testimony on the al eged incident and ruled
the former slave before him guilty. He levied a ne of $24. The vast
majority of African Americans in the county—or the entire South
for that mat er— in 1881, given the same outcome, would have
faced a Faustian bargain. Twenty-four dol ars was a huge sum, the
equivalent for most laborers of three months or more of wages.
Without cash, the typical freedman would have had to choose
between spending a year or more held by the county in a primitive
jail, and working a chain gang on the roads each day. Or he could
agree to work for an even longer period as the near-property of a
white man wil ing to pay the fine on his behalf.
Milt Cot ingham enjoyed a rare advantage. The community of
former Cot ingham slaves remained su ciently intact—and had
prospered enough during Reconstruction—that Milt's brothers,
James and George, appeared on his behalf, with $24 in hand. The
black Cot inghams had not yet been crushed. Milt was set free.56
On February 13, 1893, the Bibb County Commission voted to
"hire out convicts of the County that have heretofore and may
hereafter be convicted." The probate judge, M. Y. Hayes, was made
the labor agent for the county and ordered to enter into a two-year
contract under which convicts would be leased out for $4 per
month "per head," and $2.50 to cover the county court costs of each
prisoner.
Two years later, in 1895, the commission authorized Hayes to
continue leasing "as in his discretion he deems best." At the same
meeting, the commission approved a proposal for upgrading and
repairing a local road— perhaps the modest government's single
most important function in encouraging the prosperity of its rural
residents. The road to be improved that winter was the one leading
to the farm of Elisha's son whose children had been forced to trek
across the war-riven South in 1862, Moses L. Cot ingham.57 When
the cot on came in later that year, the white Cot ingham would
the cot on came in later that year, the white Cot ingham would
have no trouble get ing to market.
IV
GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD
"The negro dies faster. "
In the two decades after Henry and Mary Cotinham exchanged
vows at Wesley Chapel, the pair had successful y established their
own self-sustained lives apart from the old Cot ingham plantation.
They and many of the other former slaves who had banded together
with Scipio and lived in proximity at the crossroads of Six Mile
eventual y moved into the set lement at Brier eld, the remnants of
the town surrounding the old furnaces where Scipio had worked as
a slave and a freedman and the location of a basic school for black
children.
The Cot ingham slaves scratched out a tenuous self-reliant life.
But the years did not pass easily. Mary's increase, as Elisha
Cot ingham had cal ed the future o spring of the slave girl Francis
when he gave her away in 1852, had been great, but leavened with
pain and sorrow. She carried nine children to birth. Only six
survived early childhood. Cooney the lit le freedom baby who had
arrived with such expectation, was not among them.
The last of Henry and Mary's children, a fourth boy, came in May
of 1886. Henry cal ed him Green, the same name as Henry's
mulat o uncle born on Elisha Cot ingham's plantation more than
fifty years earlier.
Beyond the confines of the family's strained domesticity, lit le else
was evolving in the way that Henry and Mary and mil ions of other
black southerners, had imagined at the dawn of freedom.
As Green grew into school age and then adolescence, the family
increasingly felt the repercussions of two convulsive crescendos
building toward a climax early in the next century. First was the
progressively more overt e ort to obliterate al manner of black
independence and civic participation in the South—the e ective
reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth amendments. Then came a fevered movement to fol ow
the great American territorial expansions of the nineteenth century
with an era of unprecedented government-engineered social and
economic uplift almost whol y reserved for whites. The two
campaigns arrived like successive storms on a shore—the rst
violent wave smashing any creation of man, the second scouring
what had been,
scat ering the remains, and saturating the soil with
salt.
The totality of the destruction to be wrought on American blacks
was underscored by a remarkable and lit le acknowledged facet of
southern life in the nal two decades of the 1800s. African
Americans, by the most critical economic measures, were not
signi cantly disadvantaged in comparison to the great mass of poor
whites that surrounded them in the South. Of 4.4 mil ion black
southerners, poverty was abject and daunting. But mil ions of white
southerners shared the same plight. And while more than half of
southern blacks—about 2.5 mil ion—could not read, there were 1.3
mil ion whites among their neighbors who also were il iterate.
The prolonged economic inferiority and social subjugation of
African Americans that was to be ubiquitous in much of the next
century was not a conclusion preordained by the traditions of
antebel um slavery.
Indeed, optimism and an expansive sense of opportunity
pervaded black life in the years surrounding Green Cot enham's
birth in 1886. African Americans stil felt strongly that they were on
the cusp of authentic integration into mainstream American life.
Inspired by the moral force of the Civil War victory and the
pronouncements of evangelical uplift, self-reliance, and personal
improvement o ered by an army of black pastors and statesmen of
abolition such as Frederick Douglass, and soon Booker T
Washington, black Americans were poised to assimilate ful y into
American society. Already, African Americans were seeing concrete
dividends from the black public schools established during
dividends from the black public schools established during
Reconstruction.
The chal enges of freedom's aftermath remained surmountable,
and the United States, just beginning to emerge as a truly modern
nation, was embarking upon an unparal eled period of strategic
social uplift. Blacks and poor whites alike were ready to exploit the
opportunities of what would become a fty-year campaign by
federal and state governments to dramatical y elevate the horizons
of tens of mil ions of Americans living in crude frontier towns,
urban tenements, and the isolation of remote rural farms.
By World War I , mil ions of white southerners had been raised
from profound poverty, il iteracy, and ignorance to at least modest
middle-class status. Free public schools, consistent medical care,
passable roads, clean tap water, electricity, even the concept of
regular hourly wage work—al stil rarities across the South and
much of the rest of the nation at the dusk of the nineteenth century
—were promulgated upon mil ions of the most dispossessed of
Americans with a speed and e cacy that in hindsight made the
Great Society initiatives of the 1960s appear timid and indolent.
Even as southern whites rampaged violently and blacks su ered a
grinding series of legal and political reverses, African American
men continued to save meager funds to buy farms, mules, and
plows. Black land ownership surged. New communities were
established. Additional schools were opened against extraordinary
odds. Most African Americans were resigned to the reality that
whites would hold a dominant position in southern society, but
found it incomprehensible that they and their descendants might be
relegated again to a permanent, inferior social and legal position.
Many, probably a majority, were reconciled to the likelihood of
second-class citizenship. But, as argued by Booker T. Washington,
they saw this status as a way station to ful participation in society
—a time to build economical y and overcome the most obvious
vestiges of slavery. Tens of thousands of blacks continued to
exercise their vote, and a not insigni cant number of white leaders
stil accepted, even if reluctantly, that the equal citizenship of
former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal
former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal
construct of separate-but-equal segregated government services—
which would de ne the long era of Jim Crow in the twentieth
century—had not yet been clearly established. Even the practice of
identifying in government records every citizen as either "Negro" or
"White"—a nearly obsessive American compulsion by early in the
next century—in many areas had not yet become routine.
But the succeeding years would come as if the masses of
povertystricken whites and blacks were twin siblings of a parent
indulgent to one and venomous to the other. A new national white
consensus began to coalesce against African Americans with
shocking force and speed. The general white public, the national
leadership of the Republican Party, and the federal government on
every level were arriving at the conclusion that African Americans
did not merit citizenship and that their freedom was not valuable
enough to justify the con icts they engendered among whites. A
growing body of whites across the nation concluded that blacks
were not worth the cost of imposing a racial morality that few in
any region genuinely shared. As early as 1876, President Ulysses S.
Grant, commander of the Union army of liberation, conceded to
members of his cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freed
slaves the right to vote, had been a mistake: "It had done the Negro
no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a
political advantage to the North."1 "The long controversy over the
black man seems to have reached a nality," wrote the Chicago
Tribune, approvingly. Added The Nation: "The Negro wil
disappear from the eld of national politics. Henceforth, the nation,
as a nation, wil have nothing more to do with him."2 That the
parent had once sacri ced enormously to rescue the less favored
child only made its abandonment deeply more bit er.
By the end of the 1940s, when Green Cot enham might have been
easing toward a workman's retirement, it was only his white peers
who approached old age as the rst American generation with
social y guaranteed security. Emerging among the children and
grandchildren of those whites was a level of modest wealth,
educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to
educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to
anyone in the South of 1886. For the rst time in U.S. history, a
geographical y broad and stable national middle class had evolved
—an anchor of sustained wealth and shared values that would
sculpt American life through the end of the twentieth century. But it
would be defined in white-only terms.
The South was in the midst of an economic and cultural convulsion,
one that should have o ered an opening for a radical rede nition
of the roles of blacks and whites in American life. A terrible
depression in the 1870s had nal y eased as the South began to
emerge from economic ruin. In the disputed presidential election of
1876, white southern political leaders leveraged the electoral
vote, Samuel J. Tilden, of the White House. In return, the Congress
and the administration of the fraudulent new Republican president,
Rutherford B. Hayes, final y removed the last Union troops from the
South and ended a decade of federal occupation of the region.3 An
era of southern economic revitalization appeared to be at hand. In
1886, Henry Grady the dynamic young editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, famously declared the creation of a "New South"—one
in which industrialism would replace agriculture and in which the
con icts of region and race that had paralyzed the nation for more
than twenty-five years were at an end.
In some places, the economic evolution was truly
phantasmagoric. In 1880, large portions of Alabama remained as
sparsely populated as the newest western territories of the United
States. Most of the state averaged fewer than twenty residents per
square mile. A decade later, nearly al of Alabama was as thickly
populated as most states to the east.
Birmingham il ustrated the tectonic forces at work in U.S. society
more than any other place. The booming city erupted out of
abandoned forest in the 1870s and suddenly became a national
center for the making of iron and steel. As coal production in
Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000
Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000
tons in 1881, the city built thousands of new homes, laid streets,
instal ed the infrastructure of a major capital, and opened schools,
churches, and col eges. Je erson County, center of the boom, nearly
quadrupled from fewer than 25,000 residents in 1880 to nearly
90,000 ten years later. By 1900, the number approached 150,000.4
The entire U.S. economy was surging with industrial fervor,
generating a ravenous appetite for Alabama's coal and iron ore.
Wal Street nanciers joined with the South's new generation of
industrialists, men such as Col. James W Sloss, James
DeBardeleben, and Truman Aldrich, to aggressively exploit the
deposits of iron ore and apparently limitless seams of coal that
riddled the Appalachian foothil s of northern Alabama. In 1878,
Sloss— one of the original lessors of Alabama prisoners sixteen
years earlier— DeBardeleben, and Aldrich formed the Prat Coal
and Coke Co., and took over what would become the underground
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