cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the elds hacked
from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached
gravestones clustered atop the hil stil bore the Cot ingham name.
Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself,
in an Alabama territory that was stil untamed. It was 1817, and
Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by
the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American
nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would
ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Paci c
Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.
Elisha's brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded
county seat of Centrevil e, where in short order shal ow-draft
riverboats would land and a trading center would be established.2
Another brother, Wil iam, moved farther south. But Elisha and his
younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In
the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought
in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and
planted season upon season of cot on. The engines of their
enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported
them to Alabama and later bred more themselves—including Henry
—from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic
slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of
ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising
"Negroes for Sale." Manning farms strung along a looping wagon
road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins,
and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black
labor to the rich black land, the Cot ingham brothers became
prosperous and comfortable.
Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county
Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county
Prat 's Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba
and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the
Cot inghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of
Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had fel ed the
rst timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work
not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled
into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water,
imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the
Cot inghams, this place was Riverbend.
The Cot inghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their
bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous
investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especial y in contrast to
the industrial slavery that would eventual y bud nearby, life on the
Cot ingham plantation re ected the biblical understanding that
cruelty to any creature was a sin—that black slaves, even if not
quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.
Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings,
Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins
built of rough-hewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock
replaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded
the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in
their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single
twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two
young boys and a seven-year-old girl.3
Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha's grandson
Oliver, raised there on the Cot ingham farm, would have been a
lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named
Henry4 When Elisha Cot ing-ham's daughter Rebecca married a
neighbor, Benjamin Bat le, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a
wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and
servant. "In consideration of the natural love and a ection which I
bear to my daughter," Elisha wrote, I give her "a certain negro girl
named Frances, about 14 years old."5
Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with
Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with
neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a
clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger
human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his
slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who
ministered to al of the souls on the Cot ingham place. The Starr
family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant
dead, was set down the hil and toward the road, even more
vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.
Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation
still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cot ingham
master— giving permission to marry to a favored mulat o named
Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha's side past
emancipation and until the old master's death, would become the
namesake of Henry and Mary's youngest son.
But even as Elisha had al owed a strain of tenderness to co-reside
with the brutal y circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost
sight of their fundamental de nition—as cat le. They were creatures
bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to
daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate
in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one
slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought
him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify,
his newlywed daughter received al "future increase of the girl."6
The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one
year his junior, in 1868 was the rst among Cot ingham people,
black or white, in two seasons. Another slave, Albert, had wed, and
left for good in the middle of the rst picking time after the
destruction of the war—amid the chaos and uncertainty when no
one could be sure slavery had truly ended.7 Albert didn't wait to
find out.
Now, two years later, the coming marriage surely warmed Elisha
at some level. But as Henry prepared to take a wife and become a
man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had
man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had
forged—everything on which that gift to his daughter twenty years
before had been predicated— hung in the fragile limbo of a
transformed social order. Whatever satisfaction the lial ties gave
the white master at the wedding of his former bondsman would
have been tempered by the poverty and grief that had
overwhelmed him.
Most of Elisha's slaves remained nearby. Some stil worked his
property, for wages or a share of the cot on crop. But the end of the
war had left the white Cot inghams at a point of near desolation.
The hard winter threatened to bring them to their knees.
As Henry and Mary's wedding approached in 1868, whites across
the South strained to accept the apparently inevitable ignominies
descending from the war. The loss of fortunes, the war's blood and
sorrow, the humiliation of Union soldiers encamped in their towns,
al these things whites had come to bear. They would bear them a
lit le longer, at least until the instant threats of hunger and military
force receded.
But these abominations paled against the specter that former
slaves, with their huge mathematical majorities in Louisiana,
Mississippi, southern Alabama, south Georgia, and South Carolina,
would soon vote and rule governments and perhaps take their
masters’ lands. This vision was a horror almost beyond
contemplation. It poisoned the air for Elisha and other white
landowners with prospects for even greater disaster.
In the last days of ghting, the U.S. Congress had created the
Freed-men's Bureau to aid the South's emancipated slaves.8 New
laws gave the agency the power to divide land con scated by the
federal government and to have "not more than forty acres of such
land …assigned" to freedmen and black war refugees for a period of
three years. Afterward, the law said former slaves would be al owed
to purchase the property to hold forever. President Andrew
Johnson rescinded the provision a few months later, but
emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that
emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that
northern soldiers stil garrisoned across the region would eventual y
parcel out to them al or part of the land on which they had long
toiled.
The threat that Elisha's former slaves would come to own his
plantation—that he and his family would be landless, stripped of
possessions and outnumbered by the very creatures he had bred and
raised—was palpable.
The last desperate ral ying cal s of the Confederacy had been
exhortations that a Union victory meant the political and economic
subjugation of whites to their black slaves. In one of the final acts of
the Confederate Congress, rebel legislators asserted that defeat
would result in "the con scation of the estates, which would be
given to their former bondsmen."9
Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by
Gen. Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman to 400,000 acres of rich
plantation land in South Carolina early in 1865. It was unclear
whether blacks would be able to retain any of the property, but
rumor ared anew among blacks across the South the next year at
Christmastime—the end of the annual crop season—that plantation
land everywhere would soon be distributed among them. The U.S.
Congress debated such a plan openly in 1867, as it drew up the
statutes to govern Reconstruction in the southern states. And again
as harvest time ended that year, word whipped through the
countryside that blacks would soon have land. At one point the
fol owing year, in 1868, during a period of intense speculation
among freed slaves that land was soon to be provided to them,
many blacks purchased boundary markers to be prepared for the
marking of of their forty-acre tracts.10
Forty miles to the west of the Cot ingham farm, in Greene
County, hundreds of former slaves led suit against white
landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be
compel ed to pay wages earned during the prior season's work.
Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it al
1,800 lawsuits filed by the freedmen.11
Despite Bibb County's remote location, far from any of the most
famous military campaigns, the Civil War had not been a distant
event. In the early months of ghting, Alabama industrialists
realized that the market for iron su cient for armaments would
become lucrative in the South. In 1860 only Tredegar Iron Works, a
vast industrial enterprise in Richmond, Virginia, driven by more
than 450 slaves and nearly as many free laborers, could produce
bat le-ready cannon for the South. The Confederate government,
almost from the moment of its creation, set out to spur additional
capacity to make arms, particularly in Alabama, where a nascent
iron and coal industry was already emerging and lit le ghting was
likely to occur. During the war, a dozen or more new iron furnaces
were put into blast in Alabama;12 by 1864, the state was pumping
out four times more iron than any other southern state.
Across Alabama, individual property holders—slaveholders
speci cal y— were aggressively encouraged to at empt primitive
industrial e orts to support the Confederate war e ort. The rebel
government o ered generous inducements to entrepreneurs and
large slave owners to devote their resources to the South's industrial
needs. With much of the major plantation areas of Mississippi
under constant federal harassment, thousands of slaves there were
without work. Slave owners wil ing to transport their black workers
to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid
conscription into the southern armies.
After seeing their homes and stockpiles of cot on burned, W H.
and Lewis Thompson, brothers from Hinds County, Mississippi, and
the owners of large numbers of slaves, moved to Bibb County
midway through the war to mine the Cahaba coal elds for the
Confederacy. They opened the Lower Thompson mine, and later
another relative and his slaves arrived to dig another mine. The coal
was hauled eleven miles to Ashby and then shipped to Selma. The
mining was crude, using picks and hand-pul ed carts. The slaves
drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the
surface.13
surface.
A neighbor of the Cot inghams, local farmer Oliver Frost,
regularly took his slaves to a cave on Six Mile Creek to mine
saltpeter—a critical ingredient for gunpowder—for the Confederate
army, often remaining there for weeks at a time. The Fancher
family, on a farm three miles north of the crossroads community
cal ed Six Mile, regularly hauled limestone from a quarry on their
property to a Bibb County furnace during the war.14
The centerpiece of the Alabama military enterprises was a
massive and heavily forti ed arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and
gunpowder mil located in the city of Selma. To produce its
weapons and metal plating for use on ironclad ships critical to the
Confederacy's limited naval operations, the Selma works relied on
enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby
Shelby and Bibb counties.15 Alabama iron was particularly wel
suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying
bat le ships with steel plates. Iron forged at Alabama's Cane Creek
Furnace, in Calhoun County, had been utilized for a portion of the
armor used to convert the hul of the captured USS Merrimac into
the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862,
bat le of ironclads.16 The Confederacy was hungry for as much of
the material as it could get.
Of particular strategic value were ironworks e
stablished by local
investors in 1862 in the vil age of Brier eld. Nine miles from the
Cot ing-ham place, the Brier eld Iron Works produced the plates
that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during
the bat le of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage
of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her
hul .17 Bibb County iron quickly became a coveted material.
As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever
increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brier eld
Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or
lease African Americans. Foundries routinely commissioned labor
agents to prowl across the southern states in search of available
slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the
slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the
Brier eld operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control
its output. The purchase encompassed "its property of al kinds
whatsoever," including thousands of acres of land and a catalogue of
dozens of wagons, wheelbarrows, coal sleds, axes, and blacksmith
tools. On the list of livestock were seventy mules, forty-one oxen,
and nine black men: "John Anderson, aged about 35, Dennis, about
38, George, about 30, Charles, about 47, Perry, about 40, Curry
about 17, Mat hew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about
30 years."18
The Confederate government began construction of a second
furnace at the site shortly after acquiring the property. Al of its
output went to the Selma Arsenal, fty miles by railroad to the
south, where the iron was used for armor and for naval guns,
including the state-of-the-art eleven-inch Brooke ri ed cannon, with
a capacity of ring a 230-pound shel more than two thousand
yards.19
By the standards of the antebel um South, the Brier eld Iron
Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder. The adjacent vil age
held church in a schoolhouse surrounded by the tenements and
smal housing for three hundred workers. Two massive brick blast
furnaces, each forty feet high, belched a thick brew of smoke and
gases at the top and a torrent of lique ed iron at the base. Nearby
was a rol ing mil where the molten iron was formed into crude
one-hundred-pound "pigs" for shipment to Selma, and loaded onto