It overlooked many of the most signi cant dimensions of the new forced labor,
including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to
suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and
the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of
African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and
tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from
political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or
forced labor camps. The judges and sheri s who sold convicts to giant
corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans
to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to
acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because
most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to
each southern state, they minimized the collective e ect of the decisions by
hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this
period to sell blacks to commercial interests.
I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of
the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward
blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial
views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—
seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the
speci c decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans
were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S.
society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black
Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people
still not free fty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the e ects of
cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation
rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of
repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new
generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and
resources.
Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage
sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original
documents and personal narratives revealing a very di erent version of events.
In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest
to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans
into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty
thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the les of the Department
of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure
entries in the public record o er details of a forced labor system of
monotonous enormity.
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over
decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands
of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of
probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this
net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than
twice that gure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original
records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential
charges or for violations of laws speci cally written to intimidate blacks—
changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a
ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women.
Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to
rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of
crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the
South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-
time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers
became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob
violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return
of forced labor as a xture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives
of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in
which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete
racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically
chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible
forces of tradition and history.
By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly recon gured to make
one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with
the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that
1901 also marked the nal full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks
throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local
mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white
business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments.
Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were
rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured
the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South
Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United
States then lived.
It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth
century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to ourish
in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with
thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories
and mines in the 1850s were also the rst to employ forced African American
labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing
slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves,
and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict
leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment
employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against
"slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed
such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These
were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that su ocated the
aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached
the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an
explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin
much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of
his life.
Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the
rising southern white assault on black independence—even as black leaders
increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for
help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of
white Americans, exhau
sted from the long debates over the role of blacks in
U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have
to accept the end of freedom.
On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the
White House from Carrie Kinsey a barely literate African American woman in
Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been
abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no
interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the
illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing
for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast
majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at
the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case
12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the
National Archives.
A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—
was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of
blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or
African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not
fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound
global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the rst time
since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior
to the Civil War.
That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow
of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to
the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of
millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era.
Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate,
comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that
enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve
their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the
United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast
majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive.
There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a
Pratt Mines burial eld. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their
existence as fragile as a scent in wind.
That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book—
especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most
interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented
details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the
place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story
gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common
slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves
versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced
labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had
been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he
produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that
steeped the place and era of Green Cot-tenham's birth; of the obliterating
forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could
the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single,
anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and
unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's
most authentic and compelling dimension.
Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the
boundaries of the burial eld, considering even without bene t of his words
the sti ed horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended
through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that
Cottenham belonged as the central gure of this narrative. The slavery that
survived long past emancipation was an o ense permitted by the nation,
perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving
thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but
every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every
direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the
time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what
happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to
orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of
the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black
man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this
book.
I
THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
Freedom wasn't yet three years old when the wedding day came.
Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop had been chat el slaves until
the momentous nal days of the Civil War, as nameless in the
eyes of the law as cows in the eld. Al their lives, they could no
more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a
wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a nal
furious sweep of Union soldiers—in a bewildering blur of
liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war—ravaged the
Cahaba River val ey.
Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no
more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr,
the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his
of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people
that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.
To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly
seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry.
In every direction from the Cot ingham Loop, the simple dirt road
alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their
former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bit er.
The val ey, the undulating hil s of Bibb County, even the bridges
and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down
from the last foothil s of the Appalachians and into the at fertile
plains to the south, were stil wrecked from the savage cavalry raids
of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April
1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in bil owing
swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scat ered
before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius
Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of
Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of
war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last
functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama
in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the val ey
remained a twisted ruin. Fal ow elds. Burned barns. Machinery
rusting at the bot oms of wel s. Horses and mules dead or lost. The
people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.
From the front porch of Elisha Cot ingham's house, two stories
stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the
river's edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren
vista. The land had long ago lost nearly al resemblance to the
massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fty
years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of
its careful y tended bounty of the last years before the war.
He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded
from the house in one long sheet of soil, fal ing gradual y away
from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly ve hundred yards,
the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when
Elisha rst arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and
south, the great eld was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up
over turtle-shel shapes of limestone protruding from the banks,
growing deeper and wider, fal ing faster and more furiously—strong
enough to spin a smal grist mil —before it turned to the west and
suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cot ing-
ham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the
place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a
resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.
Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cot ingham, like countless
other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of
an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times
constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society
they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and
humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for
generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical
spectrum of possibilities for what might yet fol ow, Elisha had to
consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al
consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al
human e ort invested at the con uence of Cot ingham Creek and
the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their
achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last
Cot ingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave