was the pastor who had been for so long a part of life at the
Cot ingham plantation. After thirty years of itinerancy among
scat ered churches, Rev. Starr was posted in 1864 to the Bibb Iron
Works, a gesture on the part of the Methodist circuit to al ow the
old preacher to nish out his days at a congregation close to the
home he cherished on Cot ingham Loop.
Starr was the archetypal backwoods Methodist. He had
completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so
completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so
profoundly uneducated that when as a man barely twenty years old
he rst began to preach at lit le churches not far from his south
Georgia birthplace, even his friends doubted privately that he could
ever carry o a career as a professional minister. But Methodism
was a young and evangelical sect in the 1830s. The rough Alabama
countryside, and especial y the masses of stil heretical slaves who
made up much of its population, was a major target for missionary
work.
The life of a Methodist circuit rider, traveling in a grinding,
repetitive loop from one set lement chapel to another, was an
entrepreneurial task of establishing churches and converting the
unwashed. A vigorous iconoclast such as Starr could overcome
academic ignorance with a fundamentalist fervor for the Bible and a
resounding voice from the pulpit. Starr had done that, winning
postings at a string of smal Methodist congregations across Georgia
and then Alabama. 53
Through the years, he had been formal y assigned to nearly
twenty di erent congregations in the circuits orbiting the Bibb
County seat of Cen-trevil e. Along with each of those churches had
come responsibility for stil more gatherings of the faithful who
worshipped in the homes of scat ered landowners or in remote
rustic set lement chapels. That duty had delivered Starr to the home
of Elisha Cot ingham, and eventual y the preacher bought a smal
piece of Cot ingham land to which he hoped someday to retire.
The people of Riverbend, free whites and black slaves, had met
for services on Elisha's plantation for so long that in minutes of the
meetings of the Methodist circuit, the congregation was known
simply as "Cot ingham's." After nearly twenty years, its members
raised a spare one-room church in the 1840s on the adjacent land
of Elisha's brother, John Cot ingham. Built on immense timber
joists, resting on pil ars of limestone rock, it would stand against
the wind and shifting times for nearly a century and a half. The
builders dubbed it Wesley Chapel.54
Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed
Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed
his step, it was to this corner of Bibb County that he was drawn to
rest. One of the preacher's sons, Lucius E. Starr, grown and ready to
raise a family of his own, became a physician and made a name for
himself in the county seat. The Cot inghams were good to Rev. Starr
and his wife, Hannah, and after a lifetime of near constant motion it
must have been a relief to him in 1860 to buy land right beside the
family that had treated them so wel .55 The Starr home was within
walking distance of the spare country chapel and the Cot ingham
family cemetery, where Starr already hoped to be buried. They
cal ed the farmhouse the "preacher's sanctum."
By the nal months of the war, the old rebrand knew wel life's
most bit er stings. His namesake son, also a Methodist minister, died
in an epidemic of yel ow fever a few years before secession. One of
his youngest, Wilbur Fisk, another likely playmate of the slave
Henry and Elisha's grandson Oliver, became a sergeant in the
Alabama 29th Infantry before seeing his unit decimated in savage
ghting across north Georgia. He died soon after during the long
defense of Atlanta in 1864.
As an unschooled man, Starr, in his day, had a particular appeal
for the raw country folk that predominated the rut ed back roads of
the South. That translated as wel into an a nity for slaves. As a
young pastor on the circuits of Georgia, Starr was praised for his
ministrations to the souls of black folks as he gal oped among the
plantations and camp meetings of south Alabama.56 So it was
t ing that the nal church appointment of his long career, where
he would wait out the end of the war, was to the ironworks at
Brier eld where slavery was being practiced in its most raw and
brutalizing form. There, Scip and the preacher Starr toiled at their
respective tasks, until General Wilson's army descended.
A few months after the surrender of the Confederacy, the U.S.
government sold the wrecked ironworks at Brier eld to the man
who during the war had been responsible for arming the entire
southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven
southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven
Alabama wartime industrial complex. Gorgas, a Pennsylvania native
who married the daughter of a former Alabama governor, had
become a commit ed Confederate, rising to the rank of general by
war's end. After the surrender, he worked tirelessly to return the
furnaces to ful use and profitability.
But the ravaged state of Alabama that surrounded him made that
plan nearly impossible. The cost of paying market rate wages to
black men such as Scip who had worked as slaves during the war
totaled a bankrupting $200 per day. Those black laborers Gorgas
could pay and keep on hand were repeatedly harassed by
marauding bands of Ku Klux Klan members. Gorgas, like Elisha
Cot ingham and so many other whites bewildered by both the
rami cations of black emancipation and the continuing venality of
renegade whites, was disconsolate. The South they rst dreamed of
making an independent republic grounded in slavery—and then
dreamed of rebuilding as a rival to the North—appeared
irretrievably broken. "What an end to our great hopes!" he wrote in
his diary. "Is it possible that we were wrong?"57
Scip Cot inham, having learned the skil s of a foundry worker
during the war, must in his own way also have been ba ed by the
extraordinary turn of events that left him a free man in the twilight
of his life.
Neither he nor Henry would likely have known what to say to so
strange and moot a white man's question as the one posed by
Gorgas to his diary. But they would have had no doubt as to
whether Gorgas and the Cot ingham brothers, and the hundreds of
thousands of other southern men who had taken up arms during the
war, had been wrong.
Before Union troops arrived in Bibb County, the night hours had
permit ed Henry his one limited taste of freedom within the
con nes of chat el life. It was after sundown that the slaves of
Riverbend and other farms could slip quietly through the forests to
see and court one another.
Now freedom had turned darkness into light. Henry young and
Now freedom had turned darkness into light.
Henry young and
strong at the very moment of the rebirth of his people, no longer
had to wait for the passage of the sun into the horizon. His feet
could carry him ying down the dusty track to the Bishop place, in
plain daylight for al to see, past old Elisha's cabins, past the store
at Six Mile, past the broken iron furnace at Brierfield, to Mary.
For Henry and Mary, freedom was a tangible thing, and January
was a ne time for a wedding. Both raised on the banks of the
Cahaba, they were as at uned to the seasonal swel s of the river and
the deep soil on its edges as the great stretches of spidery white
lilies that crowded its shoals each spring and retreated into its
depths every winter.
Picking last fal 's crop of cot on in the val ey had gone on until
nearly Christmas. In another two months, it would be time to begin
knocking down the brit le cot on stalks left from last year,
harnessing the mules and plows, and breaking the crusted soil for a
new crop. Planting season came hard on the heels of that, and
before long it would be summer, when mule hooves and plow
blades and bare black feet, slavery or no slavery, would march
between the furrows, without rest, for nearly every hour of every
day. So that January, bit er as was its wind, arrived for them sweet
and restful.
Like Henry and Mary al of Alabama, and the South—indeed at
one level al of the United States—was set ing up housekeeping in
the winter of 1868. Rede ned by war, grief, deprivation, death, and
emancipation, America was faced with the chal enge of repairing
and reordering a col ective household.
Some of the old slaves said they too weren't sure what "freedom"
real y was. Henry likely couldn't explain it either, but he had to
know. This wedding day was emancipation. It was the license from
the courthouse and big leather-bound book that listed his marriage
right beside those of the children of the old master. It was his name
on the piece of paper, "Henry Cot-tinham." No more was he one of
the "Cot ingham niggers."
To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er
To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er
time to marry They marched the few steps to the house of Rev.
Starr, down to the Cot ingham chapel around the curve, and took
their vows as free citizens.58 Henry Cot inham was a man, with a
name, spel ed just the way he had always said it. Freedom was an
open eld, a strong wife, and time to make his mark. Mary's
"increase," like the product of al their labor, would be theirs—not
Elisha Cot ingham's. Henry would plant his seed, in soil he knew
and in Mary his wife. In a few years, they would have a son named
Green. Henry would raise up the o spring of the land and of his
blood.
Surely, that was freedom.
I
AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY
"Niggers is cheap."
Across the South, white southerners were ba ed. What to do with
.freed slaves like Henry Cot inham and his grandfather Scip?
They could not be driven away. Without former slaves—and
their steady expertise and cooperation in the elds—the white
South was crippled. But this new manifestation of dark-skinned
men expected to choose when, where, and how long they would
work. Those who could not nd employ wandered town to town,
presumptuously asking for food, favors, and jobs.
To get from place to place, or to reach locations where work had
been advertised, they piled onto the empty freight cars of what few
trains stil ran. They formed up at night around camp res in the
shadows of train depots and cot on warehouses on the fringes of
towns. In the face of hostile whites—the Ku Klux Klan and members
of other suddenly ourishing secret white societies—they
brandished guns and were wil ing to use them. Beyond gal to their
former masters, these meandering swarms of il iterate men also
expected to be al owed to vote.
The breadth of white venom toward freed slaves—and the
decades of venality that fol owed it—belied the wide spectrum of
perspectives on slavery shared by white southerners before the war.
From the earliest years of the North American colonies, whites
struggled to resolve vastly di ering views even among slaveholders
of the place and position of blacks in the new society.
Colonial America began as a place uncertain of the abject
subjugation of native Indian populations and thousands of African
slaves pouring into the Western Hemisphere. Many were perplexed
by the concept of categorizing humans by race and skin color,
versus the long-standing European tradition of identi cation rooted
in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of
in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of
colonization in the 1600s, "slave" and "Negro" were not synonymous
in the American colonies. Slaves were as likely to be Indians as
Africans. Some early owners of black slaves were themselves black.
Free Africans in Virginia were permit ed to vote wel into the
1700s. Many indentured white servants were coerced into extending
their labor contracts until death—e ectively making them light-
skinned slaves.
whites in general—and Englishmen in particular—colonial
legislatures, especial y in Virginia, South Carolina, and, later,
Georgia, began in the 1650s to systematical y de ne residents by
color and lineage. The intentions were twofold: to create the legal
structure necessary for building an economy with cheap slave labor
as its foundation, and secondly, to reconcile bondage with America's
revolutionary ideals of intrinsic human rights. Blacks could be
excluded from the Enlightenment concepts that every man was
granted by God individual freedom and a right to the pursuit of
happiness because colonial laws codi ed a less-than-ful y-human
status of any person carrying even a trace of black or Indian blood.
Instead of embracing the concept that regardless of color "Al men
are created equal," with no king or prince born to higher status than
any other, colonial leaders extended a version of "royal" status to al
whites.
Stil , vast swaths of the region, including the rock-strewn
Appalachians stretching from northern Alabama, across Georgia,
and up through the Carolinas and Virginia, contained virtual y no
slaves at al . Indeed, in some of those places, companies of men had
gathered after secession, armed themselves, and marched north to
join with the Union armies moving upon the South.
In other places, men who owned hundreds or thousands of slaves
nonetheless wrestled without resolution with the subtle moralities
of human bondage and the tra cking of men. Robert Wickli e,
owner of more slaves than any other person in Kentucky and likely
anyone in the United States, argued passionately against the
exportation of slaves from the coastal regions of the United States
exportation of slaves
from the coastal regions of the United States
to the comparative horrors of Deep South plantations in Georgia
and Mississippi. The 1860 census counted among four mil ion
blacks in the South more than 250,000 free African Americans in
the slave states, more than fty thousand of them in Virginia. In
Louisiana, a handful of black freedmen owned dozens of slaves. In
the intricately hued tapestry of New Orleans, more than three
thousand free blacks owned slaves themselves.1
But in what came to be known as the Black Belt—a long curve of
mostly al uvial cot on farmland stretching across the fertile atlands
ranging from South Carolina through the lower reaches of Georgia
and Alabama, and then extending across Mississippi and Louisiana
—antebel um society had been built whol y on true chat el slavery.
Mil ions of slaves came to live there under the ruthless control of a
minority of whites. Here, the moral rationalization of slavery—and
the view of slaves as the essential proof of white men's royal status
—became as fundamental to whites’ perception of America as the
concept of liberty itself. A century later, this was the paradox of the
post-Civil War South—recognition of freed slaves as ful humans
appeared to most white southerners not as an extension of liberty
but as a violation of it, and as a chal enge to the legitimacy of their
definition of what it was to be white.
The destruction of slavery in the Civil War didn't set le this
contradiction. Instead, it made more transparent the fundamental
question of whether blacks and whites could ever cohabit
peaceful y—of whether American whites in any region could
recognize African Americans as humans. Faced with the mandated
equality of whites and blacks, the range of southern perspectives on
race distil ed to narrow potency. Even among those who had been
troubled by—or apathetic toward—slavery before the war, there
was scant sympathy for the concept of ful equality. By
overwhelming majorities, whites adopted an assessment of the
black man paral el to that in the great crescent of cot on country.
The Civil War set led de nitively the question of the South's
continued existence as a part of the United States, but in 1865 there
was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and
was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and