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Slavery by Another Name

Page 13

by Douglas A. Blackmon

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
r />   col ege system to rob the winner of a huge majority of the popular

  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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