of Smith's, Col. C. C. Huckabee, was a planter and longtime major
slaveholder. His forced workers were a key element of his
investment in the enterprise, and in its expansion during the war.
Enormous numbers of men were needed to provide the quantities
of wood, ore, and limestone required by a nineteenth-century
furnace. "I set al my niggers to work in the woods," Huckabee later
recal ed, "and for many a day after that, the axes sounded like
thunder in the pines."30
At the Wares’ Shelby Iron Works, slaves were the salvation of the
operation's ability to continue supplying thousands of tons of iron
to the Confederacy. Perhaps owing to his New England origins,
Ware had never seriously considered extensive use of black labor in
the rst fteen years of business. In 1859, however, he inquired
about the industrial use of slaves in a let er to Joseph R. Anderson,
about the industrial use of slaves in a let er to Joseph R. Anderson,
manager of the Tredegar Works and perhaps the most famous
southern industrialist of the era. Anderson responded
enthusiastical y and o ered to sel Ware some of Tredegar's wel -
trained factory slaves.31
Ware didn't buy any of the African Americans available from
Virginia, but he did bring in as partners several of Alabama's most
prominent proponents of industrialism.32 They in turn began to
acquire black laborers aggressively Soon, Shelby Works, with
dozens of African American forced laborers on its balance sheet,
was the largest owner of slaves in the county. Nearby, the Alabama
Coal Mining Co. owned another dozen slaves, al men aged twenty-
six to sixty.33
In 1862, the Shelby Works contracted with the Confederate
government to produce the vast quantity of twelve thousand tons of
iron a year for the war e ort, e ectively placing the operation
under the control of the Confederate chief of ordnance in
Richmond, Col. Josiah Gorgas, and his iron agent at the rebel
arsenal and munitions factory in Selma, Col. Colin J. McRae. For
the course of the war, the Shelby Works at empted to keep its
furnaces in near constant blast—producing huge quantities of iron
to be shipped to gun barrel makers in Mississippi and Georgia,34
and to the cannon and plate armor manufacturers at Selma. A
second furnace was added in 1863 to boost the war ef ort.35
With most of the white male population already mustered or
conscripted into ghting units, the company's only option for
ful l ing its obligations was to rely almost entirely on slaves.
Borrowing from the practices of railroads and the few other
industrial systems already familiar to businessmen of the South, the
Shelby Works quickly came to rely on "leased" slave labor that
would prove both extraordinarily ef ective and resilient.
To procure the slaves, the Shelby Works hired a labor agent
named John M. Til man to lease African Americans from plantation
owners in central Alabama, northeastern Mississippi, and eastern
Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as
Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as
possible, and the feed corn to feed both the four-legged and two-
legged creatures he col ected.36
Leased slave laborers typical y cost $120 a year near the
beginning of the war, but their cost more than doubled by the crisis
years of 1864 and 1865. Slaves with a particularly useful skil , such
as carpentry or prior iron-making experience, fetched $500 or more
per year. The great majority were men aged twenty to forty- ve,
engaged in the back-breaking work of cut ing timber in nearby
forests and digging iron ore and limestone. They were
supplemented by a much smal er number of women and their
children who performed menial tasks such as cooking and cleaning.
Soon, Ware was the master of between 350 and 400 slaves. His
company remained hungry for more.37
Ware's slaves worked under the control of a white overseer,
mostly in gangs of men assigned to speci c tasks. Under terms of
the contracts, owners received quarterly payments, and their slaves
were provided with basic food, clothing, and shelter. If a slave
escaped, it was the responsibility of the company to pay a fee for
the slave's arrest and return to the ironworks. As an incentive to
work hard and fol ow rules, slaves were permit ed to earn smal
amounts of cash for themselves—typical y less than $5 a month—by
agreeing to perform extra tasks such as tending the furnace at night,
cut ing extra wood, or digging additional ore.38
The company overseer, cal ed "boss" or "captain" by the slaves,
was not empowered to severely discipline the leased slaves in his
charge. Punishment remained the province of the owner. When
slaves at empted to ee, stole, or refused the orders of the overseer,
Shelby Works wrote the owner for instructions on how to handle
his property. The punishments meted out by plantation masters to
the slaves who worked under their direct employ were often harsh
in the extreme, even torturous by modern sensibilities. But few
slave masters encouraged the forge operators to treat their valued
stock with brutality, particularly when the e ciency of the slave
had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at
had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at
Christmas reported to their owners that the managers of the
ironworks had abused them often were not made available to the
company again. Moreover, slaves with wives stil living back at the
plantations from which they had come were al owed to return
home periodical y, sometimes several times a year.
Industrialists were embracing the same practices across the South.
An advertisement placed by the Empire State Iron and Coal Mining
Company of Trenton, Georgia, in the Huntsvil e, Alabama,
Confederate in 1863 sought to "hire or buy, 100 able-bodied hands,
to be employed at their works … 20 miles southwest of
Chat anooga."39
In 1862, an Alabama engineer named John T Milner and his
business partner, Frank Gilmer, convinced the Confederate
government to nance the construction of a blast furnace on Red
Mountain in Je erson County to produce iron for the war e ort.
The plant, constructed and operated primarily by slaves, marked
the birth of the vast industrial complex that would surround the
new city of Birmingham by the end of the century. By the time the
Red Mountain furnace was in operation in 1863, Milner and Gilmer
had also opened a complex of mines operated with slave labor near
the town of Helena, Alabama.40 Within a decade after the war, the
Helena mines would be manned entirely by convict forced laborers
and set an early standard for the depredations against ostensibly
emancipated African Americans.
Everywhere in the South that could produce coal or iron during
the war, southern industrialists were being pressured to increase
production at existing mines and furnaces, or to seize and reopen
idled business. In a move that would hang ominously over the
descendants of the Cot ingham slaves, southern industrialists in
1861 took over a mining company near Tracy City, Tennessee,
previously control ed by a syndicate of northern investors.
With the outbreak of war, the formerly New York-control ed
mines of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. were placed in the
hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,
hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,
the southerner who took over management of the company in
1861, immediately placed forty slaves in the concern's Sewanee
Mines. He was quickly pleased with their performance, tel ing a
newspaper reporter: "In a few months they were doing good service
and not one of the party failed in the ef ort to learn to dig coal."41
The business would become the largest commercial enterprise in
the South, and a half century later the largest subsidiary of U.S.
Steel, and the company that would acquire Scip's grandson Green
Cot enham four decades later.
To the enterprising industrialists who would reshape the southern
economy in the half century after the Civil War, the new concepts
of industrialized black labor had taken rm hold. Long before the
end of chat el slavery, Milner was in the vanguard of that new
theory of industrial forced labor. In 1859, he wrote that black labor
marshaled into the regimented productivity of factory set ings
would be the key to the economic development of Alabama and
the South. Milner believed that white people "would always look
upon and treat the negro as an inferior being." Nonetheless—indeed
for that very reason—blacks would serve a highly useful purpose as
the clever mules of an industrial age, "provided he has an overseer
—a Southern man, who knows how to manage negroes."42 Milner's
intuition that the future of blacks in America rested on how whites
chose to manage them, whether in slavery or out of it, would
resonate through the next half century of national discourse about
the proper role of the descendants of Africa in American life.
Milner was no mere theorist. He was a dogged executor of his
vision. It was men like Milner who would seize the opportunity
presented by convict leasing to reclaim slavery from the destruction
of the Civil War. As Alabama began sel ing its black prisoners in
large numbers in the 1870s, he scrambled to acquire al that were
available—plunging them by the hundreds into a hel ish coal
operation cal ed the Eureka mines, and later il egal y sel ing
hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal
hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal
mine, to the Georgia Pacific Railroad Co.
In every set ing that Milner employed convict slaves in the late
nineteenth century, he and his business associates subjected the
workers to almost animalistic mistreatment—a revivi cation of the
most atrocious aspects of antebel um bondage. Records of Milner's
various mines and slave farms in southern Alabama owned by one
of his business partners—a cousin to an investor in the Bibb Steam
Mil —tel the stories of black women stripped naked and whipped,
of hundreds of men starved, chained, and beaten, of workers
perpetual y lice-ridden and barely clothed.
Milner took center stage in Alabama's new industrialization,
urging southerners to "go to work…eradicating the diseases that are
destroying us." Part of that eradication would be to successful y re-
regiment freed slaves. "I am clearly of the opinion, from my own
observation, that negro labor can be made exceedingly pro table in
rol ing mil s," Milner had writ en of steel production in 1859. "I
have long since learned that negro slave labor is more reliable and
cheaper for any business connected with the construction of a
railroad than white."43
Milner and others had seen his theory of the black slave as an
e ective industrial forced worker vividly ful l ed during the war.
The system emerging with the end of Reconstruction would mimic
it repeatedly. African Americans driven by the right men, in the
correct ways, could be the engines of far more complex enterprises
than the old bourbon-soaked planters would ever have believed
possible. Black laborers might not quite be men, the industrialists
reasoned, but they recognized that African Americans were far more
than apes. The renting of slaves, as much as anything, had taught
them that masses of black laborers brought under temporary control
of a commercial enterprise could be powerful y leveraged in
commerce.
The at itudes among southern whites that a resubjugation of
African Americans was an acceptable—even essential—element of
solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The
solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The
desire of white farmers to recapture their former slaves through
new civil laws was transparent. In the immediate wake of
emancipation, the Alabama legislature swiftly passed a measure
under which the orphans of freed slaves, or the children of blacks
deemed inadequate parents, were to be "apprenticed" to their
former masters. The South Carolina planter Henry Wil iam Ravenel
wrote in September 1865: "There must… be stringent laws to
labour on the farms."44
With the southern economy in ruins, state o cials limited to the
barest resources, and county governments with even fewer, the
concept of reintro-ducing the forced labor of blacks as a means of
funding government services was viewed by whites as an inherently
practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and
returning blacks to their appropriate position in society. Forcing
convicts to work as part of punishment for an ostensible crime was
clearly legal too; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
adopted in 1865 to formal y abolish slavery, speci cal y permit ed
involuntary servitude as a punishment for "duly convicted"
criminals.
Beginning in the late 1860s, and accelerating after the return of
white political control in 1877, every southern state enacted an
array of interlocking laws essential y intended to criminalize black
life. Many such laws were struck down in court appeals or through
federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures
on black life quickly appeared to replace them. Few laws
speci cal y enunciated their applicability only to blacks, but it was
widely understood that these provisions would rarely if ever be
enforced on whites. Every southern state except Arkansas and
Tennessee had passed laws by the end of 1865 outlawing vagrancy
and so vaguely de ning it that virtual y any freed slave not under
the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime. An
1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to
1865 Mississippi statute required African Amer
ican workers to
enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every
year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African
Americans could not legal y be hired for work without a discharge
paper from their previous employer—e ectively preventing them
from leaving the plantation of the white man they worked for. In
the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida enacted laws
making it a criminal act for a black man to change employers
without permission.
In nearly al cases, the potential penalty awaiting black men, and
a smal number of women, snared by those laws was the prospect
of being sold into forced labor. Many states in the South and the
North at empted to place their prisoners in private hands during
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The state of Alabama
was long predisposed to the idea, rather than taking on the cost of
housing and feeding prisoners itself. It experimented with turning
over convicts to private "wardens" during the 1840s and 1850s but
was ultimately unsatis ed with the results. The state saved some
expense but gathered no revenue. Moreover, the physical abuse that
came to be almost synonymous with privatized incarceration always
was eventual y unacceptable in an era when virtual y every convict
was white. The punishment of slaves for misdeeds rested with their
owners.
Hardly a year after the end of the war, in 1866, Alabama
governor Robert M. Pat on, in return for the total sum of $5, leased
for six years his state's 374 state prisoners to a company cal ing
itself "Smith and McMil en." The transaction was in fact a sham, as
the partnership was actual y control ed by the Alabama and
Chat anooga Railroad. Governor Pat-ton became president of the
railroad three years later.45 Such duplicity would be endemic to
convict leasing. For the next eighty years, in every southern state,
the questions of who control ed the fates of black prisoners, which
few black men and women among armies of defendants had
commit ed true crimes, and who was receiving the financial benefits
of their re-enslavement would almost always never be answered.
Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the
Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the
rate of $12.50 a month.46 In May 1868, four months after Henry