Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  rst set lers. Keystone Lime Co. supplied trainloads of the caustic

  essential ingredient for iron to the county's biggest employer, the

  antebel um Shelby Iron Works, and to the ravenous new furnaces

  coming into blast on the fringes of Birmingham.

  The bounding economic progress promised far more for whites

  than blacks, but African Americans could not resist the entrancing

  al ure of new prosperity. Shelby County was now home to growing

  numbers of the black members of the Cot ingham clan. Brier eld,

  the old Confederate munitions foundry where Green Cot enham and

  his family had sheltered during the 1890s, couldn't survive against

  the new mil ennium's technology of coal, iron, and steel

  production. The foundry town had been a refuge for the family in

  the storm of the late nineteenth century. Sheltered by the foundry's

  need for a steady supply of black workers, some of the Cot en-hams

  avoided for a time the resubjugation of African Americans occurring

  on mil ions of southern farms. A succession of black men linked

  back to the Cot ingham farm—Scip, the patriarchal slave who now

  spel ed his name Cot inham, his sons, Elbert and Henry, his

  grandsons, and others—worked in the wilting orbits of re

  surrounding the furnaces. Mary and the other wives and older

  daughters kept house and washed or cooked for laborers. The

  foundry work was grueling, but for a lit le longer Brier eld

  a orded these African Americans a way station of modest freedom

  and a residue of authentic independence that was fast disappearing

  for most rural blacks. Relatively remote from any large population

  of whites, the six hundred African Americans there could avoid the

  implicit risk of mingling with whites on the roadways into the

  county seat or accidental con icts on the back roads of the

  countryside. The whites of the furnace town needed them. Rev.

  Starr's old Methodist church stil stood—giving Brier eld's black

  families their own forum for leadership and worship. In a crude,

  overcrowded school for black children, Green and his two older

  sisters learned to read and write.

  What irony that the maker of cannons for Lee's armies and armor

  for the Confederacy's warships became a place of refuge for freed

  slaves. But Brier eld, with its redolent sense of post-emancipation

  freedom, was vanishing. By 1910 only twenty-nine people

  remained. Mary Green, and the girls, Ada and Mariet a, fol owed

  the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

  the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

  a lit le town perched on a new coal mine in Shelby County just

  south of Birmingham. Soon, Mary was working— washing and

  cleaning for a white man. Columbiana was a short freight car ride

  away. Whatever remained to harbor Green and his siblings would

  quickly dissolve before the torrent of trouble pouring across their

  world.

  Late in the summer of the great 1903 peonage trials in

  Montgomery, Green turned eighteen years old.1 Ada was twenty-

  one and Mariet a nineteen. Green and his sisters and cousins had

  experienced none of the emancipation exhilaration that their

  parents and grandparents remembered from the end of the war.

  Theirs had been a life of perplexing contradiction, of an ostensible

  but most often unrealized freedom, of supposed political and

  economic independence from whites but in truth, even in Brierfield,

  ultimately a complete dependence on the authority and protection

  of whites—or simply the security of isolation. The sisters would stay

  with their mother at least until marriage. But Green was nearly a

  man now, tal , lean, and muscular like his father, sharpened by the

  paucity of food, hardened by the incessant labor demanded of his

  life. The freedom of approaching male adulthood—even in the

  circumscribed South—was an inescapable al ure.

  Green soon ventured deep into the sphere of white men, though

  they must have remained a mystery to him. He had to know al the

  stories of his father and aunts and uncles who had lived with the

  white Cot inghams on the farm by the river. But those were ancient

  tales from before his birth. In his iron-town childhood and young

  adult years, there had never been familial bonds with any white

  people, especial y not the old Cot ingham master and his

  acknowledged of spring.

  Green's uncle, Abraham Cot ingham, the once spirited

  Republican, having journeyed farther from the country crossroads

  where the freed slaves congregated after emancipation from old

  man Cot ingham's farm than any others, made his home in Shelby

  County. Abraham's sons, Jimmy—known as "Cap"—and Frank, were

  nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

  nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

  bit ersweet paradox of black life at the dawn of the twentieth

  century. They had never been slaves. They had voted in elections.

  Now they had seen al vestiges of legal citizenship stripped away.

  Cap, Frank, and Abraham cast bal ots for the last time in 1901, the

  nal election in which blacks were permit ed meaningful

  participation in Alabama. Green would never experience that act.

  Cap Cot ingham's ouster from the voting rol s was punctuated a

  few months later by his arrest, during a visit back in Bibb County,

  on a misdemeanor charge. He was quickly sold into the bondage of

  a white farmer named O. T. Grimes. On February 18, 1902, Cap

  and another prisoner named Henry Johnson successful y ed the

  farm and escaped.2

  In the fal of 1903, as Warren Reese prepared for the last

  peonage trial in Montgomery, Cap was arrested again, this time by

  a Shelby County deputy. The charge was for violating the Alabama

  statute forbidding any person from carrying a concealed weapon.

  The records of Cap's arrest signal that he was picked up as part of a

  general roundup in Columbiana to l an order for black labor

  from Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. Cap, a muscular six-foot-

  tal thirty- ve-year-old with skin as deeply black as his great-

  grandfather Scipio's, was arrested along with another African

  American named Monroe Wal ace. Both were charged with carrying

  concealed weapons on October 2, 1903, and sentenced to four

  months and twenty days of hard labor to pay their nes and fees to

  the sheri and court. By the end of the month, the two were joined

  in the jail by seven other blacks arrested for climbing aboard an

  empty freight car, another for gambling, and one more for an

  al eged pet y theft.

  Six weeks later, on November 21, the county's convict labor

  agent, W J. Farley, emptied the jail and delivered its contents to

  Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Cap Cot ingham was turned over

  for $9 a month.3 He survived his winter in the Prat Mines and

  returned to Columbiana the fol owing year. The creep of darkness

  paused, but it would not last.

  As the new century bloomed, the civic con dence of the editor of

  the gray-typed Shelby County Sentinel was so great that
he ordered

  a photographer to document the landmarks of the burgeoning town

  and penned a twenty-page paean to its economic prospects and fine

  citizenry. It was natural, and more than a lit le self-interested, for

  editor J. A. MacKnight to do so, given that on the side he was also

  the town's leading real estate man.

  "The town is beautiful y situated, on a plateau which is

  splendidly drained," MacKnight gushed. "There is so lit le sickness

  that the doctors are nearly al poor men and their number is few."4

  Hyperbole yes, but there was good reason to be enthused. The

  county was in the sweetest bend of a rising economic curve. More

  land was under farm production than at any point since the arrival

  of white squat ers a century before. In each harvest since the turn of

  the century, Shelby's cot on gins and compresses pumped out more

  than ten thousand bales—totaling in excess of ve mil ion pounds

  of handpicked ber. The only hint of the coming bol weevil

  debacle that a decade hence would sweep in to ravage the elds

  were fearful exclamations from farmers in far-away Texas. The

  town population, more than two thousand already, was growing at

  a heady rate. Two railroads, the Southern Rail Line and the

  Louisvil e & Nashvil e, converged at the freight terminal at the end

  of Depot Street. A cot on gin, grist mil , and warehouses crowded

  the edge of the commercial district, and plans were being nalized

  for that most tantalizing of new luxuries, an electric light plant.

  Columbiana was brimming with n-de-siècle optimism. Working

  furiously to bring a measure of re nement and civic improvement,

  stil coarse towns across the South were laying the building blocks

  on which twentieth-century American prosperity would rise. The

  community's most respected leaders championed e ulgent

  campaigns to bring the rst paved streets, public schools, and

  shared utility systems—al social advancements careful y engineered

  to transform their town but that would also exclude from its

  benefits nearly al African Americans.5

  benefits nearly al African Americans.

  (There was proof to Columbiana of the town's rising

  sophistication in Henry Walthal , the son of the sheri and himself

  chief deputy at the Shelby County jail a few years earlier. In the

  1890s, he helped his father capture and sel black prisoners ful -

  time and taught theater on the side. In the summers, he produced

  Shakespeare with a local cast until final y joining a traveling theater

  company. Removed to the nascent Hol ywood, Walthal starred a

  decade later as the Colonel in The Birth of a Nation, D. W Gri th's

  1915 blockbuster lm based on the Dixon blockbuster, white

  supremacist stage show, The Clansman. The lm was the rst

  moving picture ever shown at the White House. President Woodrow

  Wilson, a southerner and an open racist, was said to have praised

  the film.)

  At the monumental cost of $250,000, Shelby County erected a

  new courthouse that without exaggeration could be described only

  as extraordinary. Replacing an unadorned brick edi ce scu ed and

  scarred with more than a half century of unceremonious use, the

  new building was a temple to citizen governance and, even more

  so, to the county's rising expectations for itself.

  At the grand entrance on Main Street, four columns soared fty

  feet to an ornate Greek Revival portico. Encircling the roo ine on

  every side, a carved parapet railing framed cupolas of hammered

  brass leaf on each wing of the building. At the center of the roof

  rose an immense octagonal clock tower, looming magni cently

  above the town. In the low sun of early evening, the building's

  chiseled west facade, constructed of thousands of tons of yel ow

  limestone quarried from the ridges above the nearby Coosa River,

  glowed luminescently The shadow fal ing to east and south was

  nearly large enough to blot out the rest of the town's jumble of

  humble red-brick stores and whitewashed houses. The building was

  the community's ag plunged into the earth of the new century, a

  clear portent of the ambitions of those who led it. A new future was

  coming, to be built and shaped in the manner of its new makers.

  The architect of this bold new vision, if not of the courthouse

  itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

  itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

  fervent populist, he commanded a nearly mesmerized local

  fol owing. How else that a county stil licking its wounds from the

  Civil War would agree to borrow a fortune to build the grandest

  courthouse in the South? To Longshore, a rate of 6 percent per

  annum on county bonds was simply the wage to be paid for a

  di erent future. Already, he dressed and looked in the manner of

  the new century rather than the last. Above a mustache twisted at

  each end and a tiny tufted goatee on the point of his chin, Judge

  Longshore looked ahead, only ahead.

  From atop the courthouse, Columbiana's other highest spire was

  clearly visible at the opposite diagonal of town. With angular

  Victorian sternness, it descended sharply into a square tower of

  stacked bricks and then three stories down to the iron-barred door

  of the Shelby County jail. A dozen dank cel s on the other side of

  the building were heated by coal grates and il uminated by shafts of

  sunlight coming between the bars on every window. As new

  prisoners passed Sheri J. H. Fulton's house next door and

  approached the front entrance on West Sterret Street, one odd

  window at the top of the jail's tower could not escape their notice.

  Almost as tal as a man, circular at the top and rectangular at the

  bot om, the opening in the shape of a giant keyhole gave view into

  the county's hanging chamber. There, men condemned to die would

  arrive on steps from the second- oor cel block and then twist at the

  end of a rope, safe from any last e orts to escape their fate, but

  with justice stil plainly on view.6

  In the newspaper editor's assessment of Columbiana in 1907,

  Mac-Knight included just one photograph containing a black face.

  Standing, expressionless, with each arm draped on the shoulders of

  a young white child in her care, the woman was identi ed only as

  "Black Mammy on Duty." On the whole, MacKnight reported that

  "the negro population is not excessive, and is orderly and law-

  abiding. They have their own churches and schools, and many of

  them own their homes. The ease with which a livelihood is made

  here renders them independent, and it is not easy to secure either

  male or female help from among them."7

  male or female help from among them."

  Indeed, obtaining African Americans was crucial and sometimes

  di cult, as any traveler arriving in Shelby County during the rst

  decade of the century would have seen long before the train pul ed

  up to the weathered wooden platform in Columbiana. The rails

  into and out of town were surrounded by endless vistas of cot on

  and its production.

  While the twentieth c
entury brought wonders of technological

  advancement in the realm of early automobiles, faster trains, and

  electric il umination, every square foot of cot on eld was being

  tended in a way lit le di erent from how Scipio had done it on the

  Cot ingham place in 1840. It took hands. Mil ions of them had to

  be available to plow and seed, and mil ions more to hoe and pick.

  That meant African Americans. Strong, dependent, docile black

  men. The leaders of Shelby County and thousands of other southern

  towns and counties were intent on assuring that they could be

  found.

  The great crusade against involuntary servitude—and especial y

  Judge Jones's famous charge to the grand jury and the Supreme

  Court's ruling against Georgia's Judge Speer—achieved an

  unexpected result for those in the South most reliant on black

  backs. Instead of ending the new regimes of forced labor, Judge

  Jones's denunciations and the subsequent legal rulings became

  guideposts for a reorganization of the contemporary tra c in black

  men. Indeed, the further the court opinions decrying peonage

  echoed across the southern landscape, the more hol ow they

  became.

  The Supreme Court's renunciation of Speer's at empt to outlaw

  the misdemeanor convict leasing system was so complete that the

  opinion was not even writ en, but issued summarily and oral y.

  Among the thousands of words of Judge Jones's famous direction to

  the federal jury on the de nitions of legal and il egal labor

  practices, a single sentence ultimately rose to greatest prominence.

  Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

  Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

  sureties "confessed judgment" for them and worked them against

  their wil could avoid violating the peonage statue by fol owing a

  simple procedure. The laborers must be convicted in an authentic

  court— not by any bumpkin justice of the peace. The judgment and

  penalty had to be writ en down and recorded with the local courts.

  And the contract between the defendant and the person paying the

  ne—in which the defendant agreed to work for a certain amount

  of time to pay o the penalty— had to be signed "in open court

  with writ en approval of the judge."

  The implication was clear. There would be no risk of another

  energetic U.S. at orney arresting white farmers for peonage so long