Online Read Free Novel
  • Home
  • Romance & Love
  • Fantasy
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery & Detective
  • Thrillers & Crime
  • Actions & Adventure
  • History & Fiction
  • Horror
  • Western
  • Humor

    Slavery by Another Name

    Page 9
    Prev Next


      and Mary's wedding, the state of Georgia signed a lease under

      which the Georgia and Alabama Railroad acquired one hundred

      convicts, al of them black, for $2,500. Later that year, the state sold

      134 prisoners to the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad and sent 109

      others to the line being constructed between the towns of Macon

      and Brunswick, Georgia.

      Arkansas began contracting out its state convicts in 1867, sel ing

      the rights to prisoners convicted of both state crimes and federal

      of enses.47Mississippi turned over its 241 prisoners to the state's

      largest cot on planter, Edmund Richardson, in 1868. Three years

      later, the convicts were transferred to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the

      former Confederate general, who in civilian life already was a

      major planter and railroad developer. In 1866, he and ve other

      former rebel o cers had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Florida leased

      out half of the one hundred prisoners in its Chat a-hoochee

      penitentiary in 1869.

      North Carolina began "farming out" its convicts in 1872. After

      white South Carolinians led by Democrat Wade Hampton violently

      ousted the last black government of the state in 1877, the

      legislature promptly passed a law al owing for the sale of the state's

      four hundred black and thirty white prisoners.

      Six years earlier, in 1871, Tennessee leased its nearly eight

      hundred prisoners, nearly al of them black, to Thomas O’Conner, a

      founding partner along with Arthur Colyar of Tennessee Coal, Iron

      & Railroad Co.48 In the four decades after the war, as Colyar built

      his company into an industrial behemoth, its center of operations

      gradual y shifted to Alabama, where it was increasingly apparent

      that truly vast reserves of coal and iron ore lay beneath the surface.

      Colyar, like Milner, was one of those prominent southern

      businessmen who bridged the era of slavery and the distinct new

      economic opportunities of the region at the end of the nineteenth

      century. They were true slavers, raised in the old traditions of

      bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

      bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

      the lash were the key to building an industrial sector in the South to

      fend of the growing influence of northern capitalists.

      Already, whites realized that the combination of trumped-up

      legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a

      desirable business proposition and an incredibly e ective tool for

      intimidating rank-and- le emancipated African Americans and

      doing away with their most ef ective leaders.

      The newly instal ed white government of Hale County—deep in

      the majority-black cot on growing sections of Alabama—began

      leasing prisoners to private parties in August 1875. A local grand

      jury said the new practice was "contributing much to the revenues

      of the county, instead of being an expense." The money derived

      from sel ing convicts was placed in the Fine and Forfeiture Fund,

      which was used to pay fees to judges, sheri s, other low o cials,

      and witnesses who helped convict defendants.

      The prior year, during a violent campaign by Ku Klux Klansmen

      and other white reactionaries to break up black Republican

      political meetings across Alabama, a white raiding party confronted

      a meeting of African Americans in Hale County. Shots were red in

      the dark and two men died—one white and one black. No charges

      were brought in the kil ing of the African American, but despite any

      evidence they caused the shooting, leading black Republicans R. H.

      Skinner and Woodvil e Hardy were charged and convicted of

      murder. They were sent to the Eureka mines south of Birmingham

      in the spring of 1876.49

      By the end of 1877, fty convict laborers were at work in

      Milner's Newcastle Coal Company mine outside Birmingham. An

      additional fty-eight men had been forced into the Eureka mines he

      founded near Helena. A total of 557 prisoners had been turned over

      that year to private corporations by the state of Alabama. 50

      By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every formerly Confederate

      state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black

      prisoners into commercial hands. There were variations among the

      states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

      states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

      functions of government were turned over to the companies

      purchasing convicts. In return for what they paid each state, the

      companies received absolute control of the prisoners. They were

      ostensibly required to provide their own prisons, clothing, and

      food, and bore responsibility for keeping the convicts incarcerated.

      Company guards were empowered to chain prisoners, shoot those

      at empting to ee, torture any who wouldn't submit, and whip the

      disobedient—naked or clothed—almost without limit. Over eight

      decades, almost never were there penalties to any acquirer of these

      slaves for their mistreatment or deaths.

      On paper, the regulations governing convict conditions required

      that prisoners receive adequate food, be provided with clean living

      quarters, and be protected from "cruel" or "excessive punishment."

      Al oggings were to be recorded in logbooks, and indeed hundreds

      were. But the only regularly enforced laws on the new slave

      enterprises were those designed primarily to ensure that no black

      worker received freedom or experienced anything other than

      racial y segregated conditions. In Alabama, companies were fined

      $150 a head if they al owed a prisoner to escape. For a time, state

      law mandated that if a convict got free while being transported to

      the mines, the sheri or deputy responsible had to serve out the

      prisoner's sentence. Companies often faced their strongest criticism

      for al owing black and white prisoners to share the same cel s.

      "White convicts and colored convicts shal not be chained together,"

      read Alabama law.51

      In almost every respect—the acquisition of workers, the lease

      arrangements, the responsibilities of the leaseholder to detain and

      care for them, the incentives for good behavior—convict leasing

      adopted practices almost identical to those emerging in slavery in

      the 1850s.

      By the late 1870s, the de ning characteristics of the new

      involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed

      with ensuring disparate treatment of blacks, who at al times in the

      ensuing fty years would constitute the vast majority of those sold

      into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

      into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

      corporations, farmers, government o cials, and smal -town

      businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance

      between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining

      them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the

      rst two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent

      of them died.52 In the fol owing year, mortality rose to 35 percent.

      In the fourth, nearly
    45 percent were kil ed.53

      I I

      SLAVERY’S INCREASE

      "Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."

      Henry and Mary did not wait long to begin their increase.

      Cooney, a lit le girl, came to them before the end of another

      harvest season had passed.1 The arrival of an infant, even more

      so a rst child, to a pair of former slaves in the rst years after

      emancipation must have been an event of sublime joy. A young

      black family of the early 1870s already knew that the presumptions

      of ful freedom that had accompanied the end of slavery were being

      gravely chal enged in the South. But surrounding and overwhelming

      the anxieties triggered by those obstructions—violence by the Ku

      Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups and the machinations of

      white political leaders—was the astonishing range of possibilities

      now at least theoretical y available to a newly born child.

      While Cooney was stil a babe, the northern states by

      overwhelming majorities rati ed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

      amendments to the Constitution, abolishing with absolute clarity

      the institution of slavery as it had existed for the previous 250 years

      and granting ful citizenship and voting rights to al black

      Americans. A black toddler in central Alabama would learn his rst

      words at a time when black men were gathering regularly with

      others to elect those who would govern their counties and states.

      Cooney was seven years old when the U.S. Congress passed its

      rst Civil Rights Act, further guaranteeing the right of African

      Americans to vote on the same terms as whites and to live as ful

      citizens in the eyes of the law. The new state legislatures of the

      South, now including substantial numbers of black Republicans,

      passed laws mandating for the rst time in the southern states that

      children, whether black or white, be a orded some semblance of

      basic education. By 1871, more than 55,000 black children were

      at ending public school in Alabama.

      at ending public school in Alabama.

      Henry and Mary knew there would be trouble, yes, plenty of it.

      But the young man and woman, il iterate, provincial, and unskil ed,

      had every reason to expect nonetheless that in the expiring of ten or

      twenty years, their daughter and the boisterous brood of boys and

      girls who would fol ow her would live lives in a world so

      transformed from their own as to be ut erly unrecognizable.

      By the time Cooney turned two, as Thanksgiving approached in

      1870, the most de ning feature of the old Cot ingham world,

      Elisha, the white man who had sculpted the landscape onto which

      Cooney was born and then seen it disintegrate, was dead.

      Elisha was laid to rest at the top of the red-clay hil , surrounded

      by what was left of the stand of beech and oak that had greeted his

      arrival in the wilderness. As his life had been on the landscape

      stretched out around him, Elisha's plot was squarely in the center of

      the graveyard, with his wife, siblings, and kin fanning out to each

      side. One body length away, just within arm's reach, lay in death a

      long row of the slaves he had governed for most of a century in

      life.2

      Old Scip, once Elisha's most reliable slave, was not easing gently

      toward his natural end. Freedom had taken tangible form for the

      former slaves of the Cot ingham farm. Old Elisha's former slaves

      separated into three groups. The rst, beginning with young Albert

      Cot ingham, abandoned Bibb County and the place of their

      enslavement as quickly as it had become clearly established that

      they were in fact free to go wherever they wished.

      Three other black families—each of them led by one from the

      generation of middle-aged slaves who had spent the longest spans

      of their lives as Cot ingham slaves—chose to remain close by the

      old master, likely stil residing in the slave quarters a short distance

      from Elisha's big house and later in simple tenant cabins erected to

      replace them. The elder Green Cot inham , a partly white slave

      now forty years old, along with his wife, Eme-line, and their baby

      boy, Caesar, remained on the farm. Likely Green's mulat o line

      boy, Caesar, remained on the farm. Likely Green's mulat o line

      connected him directly to the white Cot inghams, but no record

      survives to indicate whether that was so. Another slave father to

      remain on the place was Je Cot ingham, forty-eight, who

      continued to spel his name as his former master did, and who was

      raising in his home an eight-year-old boy named Jonathon, who

      was also partly white.3 Also staying behind was Milt, another of the

      older crew of slaves.

      On the other side of the big house, away from the slave cabins,

      lived the youngest of Elisha's sons to reach adulthood, Harvey, also

      forty years old, with his wife, Zelphia, and seven children. Slightly

      farther down the wagon road, J. W. Starr's widow, Hannah,

      remained in the preacher's house, though her son Lucius had

      become the master of the household. Next door to them, a Starr

      daughter and her family farmed on another portion of the dead

      reverend's land.

      A few miles away, beyond Cot ingham Loop, at the edge of the

      Six Mile set lement around which the lives of al the Cot inghams

      had come to orbit, Scip and the third group of former slaves set led

      themselves in a life overshadowed by their former enslavement but

      clearly distinct from the control ed lives they had formerly led.

      At the center of those former slaves remained Scipio, stil

      defiantly insistent that his birth as an African and the African origins

      of his mother and father be ful y recorded whenever the census

      taker or another government o cial inquired as to his provenance.

      He took the name Cot inham.

      Six Mile had the vague makings of a real town, with a smal

      school and a weekly newspaper that boasted of a cluster of homes,

      two stores, and a sawmil . On one boundary of the set lement lived

      George Cot inham, now forty- ve, and next door lived Henry,

      twenty-two years old, and Mary, with the lit le girl Cooney George

      and Henry, as father and son, farmed rented property, probably

      owned by the white Fancher family nearby.

      Two houses away, Scip was ensconced with Charity, his junior by

      thirty-eight years, and the ve children they had under the age of

      thirty-eight years, and the ve children they had under the age of

      fourteen. The e ort by General Gorgas to rebuild the Brier eld

      furnaces had col apsed, and the weary Confederate industrialist

      turned over the operation to another ex-rebel o cer turned

      entrepreneur.

      Scipio worked under his supervision at the Bibb furnace where

      he had spent so much of the wartime years, stil laboring at the task

      Elisha had sent him to learn in the e ort to save the Confederacy.

      He traveled daily to the furnaces, several miles away, usual y in the

      company of four much younger black men who boarded in a smal

      house near the dry goods store in Six Mile. Sometimes, Scip would

      spend the night near the furnace in rented lodgin
    gs with two of the

      men, Toney Bates, twenty-two, and Alex Smith, nineteen.4

      The free lives of Scip, George, and Henry were hardly easy. But

      for the rst time they were truly autonomous of Elisha Cot ingham

      and his kin. How long such black men in the post-emancipation

      South could remain so would become the de ning characteristic of

      their lives.

      As slaves, men such as Scipio and Henry were taught that their

      master was a palpable extension of the power of God—their

      designated lord in a supremely ordained hierarchy. In the era of

      emancipation, that role—now stripped of its religiosity and pared

      to its most elemental dimensions of power and force—was handed

      to the sherif .

      This was a new capacity for local law enforcement o cers, and

      the smal circles of elected o cials who also played a part in the

      South's criminal and civil justice systems. Prior to the Civil War, al

      of government in the region, at every level, was unimaginably

      sparse by modern standards. In Alabama, an elected board of

      county commissioners oversaw local tax col ections and

      disbursements, primarily for repairs to bridges, maintenance of the

      courthouse, and operation of a simple jail. The sheri , also chosen

      by the people, usual y spent far more time serving civil warrants

      and foreclosing property for unpaid debts than in the enforcement

      and foreclosing property for unpaid debts than in the enforcement

      of criminal statutes. The arbiter of most minor legal disputes and

      al eged crimes would be a justice of the peace, normal y a local

      man appointed by the governor to represent law and government

      in each "beat" in the state. In an era of exceedingly di cult

      transportation, beats were tiny areas of jurisdiction, often limited to

      one smal quadrant of a county. One rural Alabama county elected

      thirty justices of the peace in 1877.5 But within those boundaries,

      the justice of the peace—more often than not the proprietor of a

      country store or a large farm—held tremendous authority, including

      the power to convict defendants of crimes that carried potential

      sentences of years of confinement.

      In most southern states, county sheri s and their deputies

      received no regular salaries. Instead, the law enforcement o cers,

      justices of the peace, certain court o cials, and any witnesses who

      testi ed against a defendant were compensated primarily from

     


    Prev Next
Online Read Free Novel Copyright 2016 - 2025