Slavery by Another Name (10 page)

and during the war. The extraordinary value of organizing a gang of

slave men to quickly accomplish an arduous manual task—such as

enlarging a mine and extracting its contents, or constructing

railroads through the most inhospitable frontier regions—became

obvious during the manpower shortages of wartime.

Critical to the success of this form of slavery was dispensing with

any pretense of the mythology of the paternalistic agrarian slave

owner. Labor here was more akin to a source of fuel than an

extension of a slave owner's familial circle. Even on the harshest of

family-operated antebel um farms, slave masters could not help but

be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human

be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human

a ections that close contact with slave families inevitably

manifested.

But in the set ing of industrial slavery—where only strong young

males and a tiny number of female "washerwomen" and cooks were

acquired, and no semblance of family interaction was possible—

slaves were assets to be expended like mules and equipment. By

the early 1860s, such slavery was commonplace in the areas of the

most intensive commercial farming in Mississippi and parts of

Alabama.

It was a model particularly wel suited to mining and rst

aggressively exploited in high-intensity cot on production, in which

individual skil was not necessarily more important than brute

strength. In those set ings, black labor was something to be

consumed, with a clear comprehension of return on investment.

Food, housing, and physical care were bot om-line accounting

considerations in a formula of pro t and loss, weighed primarily in

terms of their e ect on chat el slave productivity rather than

plantation harmony.

On the enormous cot on plantations unfolding in the antebel um

years across the malarial wasteland of the Mississippi Delta,

absentee owners routinely left overseers in charge of smal armies

of slaves. In an economic formula in which there was no pretense

of paternalistic protection for slaves, the overseers drove them

mercilessly.

Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through the South prior to the

Civil War, wrote of the massive plantations of Alabama and

Mississippi as places where black men and women "work harder

and more unremit ingly" than the rest of slave country. "As

property, Negro life and Negro vigor were general y much less

encouraged than I had always before imagined them to be."7

Another observer of Mississippi farms said that on the new

plantations "everything has to bend, give way to large crops of

cot on, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, Negroes to work hot or

cold."8 Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that

cold." Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that

black laborers would also die quickly9 "The Negroes die o every

few years, though it is said that in time each hand also makes

enough to buy two more in his place," wrote planter James H.

Ruf in in 1833.10

An English traveler visiting the great plantations in the nal years

of slavery described African Americans who "from the moment they

are able to go a eld in the picking season til they drop worn out

in the grave in incessant labor, in al sorts of weather, at al seasons

of the year without any change or relaxation than is furnished by

sickness, without the smal est hope of any improvement either in

their condition, in their food, or in their clothing indebted solely to

the forbearance and good temper of the overseer for exemption

from terrible physical suf ering."11

Even large-scale slave owners who directed their business

managers to provide reasonable care for slaves nonetheless

advocated harsh measures to maintain the highest level of

production. "They must be ogged as seldom as possible yet always

when necessary," wrote one.12

An overseer's goal, a Delta planter said, was "to get as much work

out of them as they can possibly perform. His skil consists in

knowing exactly how hard they may be driven without

incapacitating them for future exertion. The larger the plantation,

the less chance there is, of course, of the owner's softening the rigor

of the overseer, or the sternness of discipline by personal

interference."13

Scip saw those changes coming. In the 1830s, a water-driven

cot on mil was constructed on a creek seven miles north of the

county seat, not far from the Cot ingham plantation.14 Employing

several dozen white laborers , the mil ginned cot on and spun it

into thread and rope. Of far more portent for Scip's future, and that

of his descendants, had been a chance discovery in the 1820s by a

white set ler named Jonathan Newton Smith. On a hunting trip

near the Cahaba, Smith was surprised when large stones pul ed

from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped

from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped

across the massive deposits of coal abounding in Alabama, and over

the next fty years would be a pioneering exploiter of the

serendipitous proximity of immense brown iron ore deposits

scat ered across the ridges and, beneath the surface, the perfect fuel

for blasting the ore into iron and steel.15 It was a combination that

would transform life in Alabama, reshaping Scip's last years of

slavery and radical y altering the lives of mil ions of individuals

over the next century.

Smith ambitiously assembled thousands of acres of land

containing mineral deposits, and by 1840, he and others had

opened smal iron forges on al sides of the Cot ingham farm. One

was built on Six Mile Creek, a few miles down the mail road

toward the nearest set lement. Another was across the Cahaba River.

A third was constructed on a tributary of the big river just north of

the plantation.16 These were crude mechanical enterprises, belching

great columns of foul smoke and rivers of e uent. But they were

marvels of the frontier in which they suddenly appeared. A giant

water-powered wheel rst crushed the iron ore, which was fed into

a stone furnace and heated into a huge red molten mass. The

"hammer man," working in nearly unbearable heat and using a red-

hot bar of metal as his tool, then maneuvered the molten iron onto

an anvil where a ve-hundred-pound hammer, also powered by the

waterwheel, pounded it into bars. Primitive as was the mechanism,

the rough-edged masses of iron were the vital raw material for

blacksmiths in every town and on every large farm to craft into the

plows, horseshoes, and implements that were the civilizing tools of

the Alabama frontier.17

In addition to Smith, two other white men living near the

Cot ingham farm, Jonathan Ware and his son Horace, were

aggressively expanding the infant industry18 To Smith's geological

observations, Horace Ware, a native of Lynn, Massachuset s, brought

a keen instinct for the market among southern cot on planters for

local y forged iron. He had learned the iron trade from his father,

and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of

and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of

iron ore in 1841. He put his first furnace into blast in 1846.19

Slaves were the primary workers at the earliest recorded coal

mines in Alabama in the 1830s. Moses Stroup, the "father" of the

iron and steel industry in Alabama, arrived in the state in 1848,

acquired land on Red Mountain just south of present-day

Birmingham, and erected his rst furnaces. By the early 1850s, he

was constructing a much larger group of furnaces in Tuscaloosa

County, entirely with slave labor.20

Indeed, nearly al of the early industrial locations of the South

were constructed by such slaves, thousands of whom became skil ed

masons, miners, blacksmiths, pat ern makers, and furnace workers.

Slaves performed the overwhelming majority of the raw labor of

such operations, working as l ers, who shoveled iron ore,

limestone, and coal into the furnaces in careful y monitored

sequence; gut ermen, who drew o the molten iron as it gathered;

tree cut ers, who fel ed mil ions of trees, and teamsters to drive

wagons of ore and coal from the mines and nished iron to railroad

heads.21Alabama's rst recorded industrial fatality was a slave

named Vann, kil ed in the early 1840s by fal ing rock in an iron ore

pit near Alabama's earliest known forge.22

Southern railroads also became voracious acquirers of slaves,

purchasing them by the hundreds and leasing them from others for

as much as $20 per month in the 1850s.23 By the beginning of the

Civil War, railroads owned an estimated twenty thousand slaves.24

Al of the early iron masters of the region relied on slaves for the

grueling menial work of clearing their property, constructing hand-

hewn stone and brick furnaces and forges, and gathering the ore

and coal exposed on outcrops or near the surface.25 As the forges

went into production, slaves were trained to perform the arduous

tasks of the blast furnace. Quickly, the Wares and other budding

industrialists began a tra c in the specialized category of slaves

trained in the skil s of making iron.

During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a

During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a

businessman in Georgia a slave named Joe. Five years later,

Jonathan Smith purchased the slave at auction for $3,000, and set

him to work as the hammer man in one of his Bibb County

forges.26 By the late 1850s, the Wares, having shifted their iron-

making operations to adjoining Shelby County, operated the largest

metal works in the Deep South, largely with skil ed slaves. Horace

Ware's son, John E. Ware, would later reminisce about the most

valued slaves at the forge. He recal ed that "Berry, Charles,

Anderson, Clark and Obediah" held key positions.27

The Hale & Murdock Furnace near Vernon, Alabama, was built in

1859 and then dramatical y expanded to meet war needs in 1862

by a force of 150 men, most of whom were slaves.28 In December

1862, a Montgomery businessman began work on an iron ore mine

and furnace north of the Cane Creek forge using a force of two

hundred slaves moved from Tennessee as federal forces advanced

from the North.29 Shortly after the operation was ful y under way,

Union general Wilson's raiders wrecked it.

In 1860, a year before the Civil War erupted, Jonathan Smith

launched his most ambitious e ort ever, the enormous ironworks at

Brier eld, less than nine miles from the Cot ingham farm. A partner

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