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.
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