Slavery by Another Name (5 page)

countryside that blacks would soon have land. At one point the

fol owing year, in 1868, during a period of intense speculation

among freed slaves that land was soon to be provided to them,

many blacks purchased boundary markers to be prepared for the

marking of of their forty-acre tracts.10

Forty miles to the west of the Cot ingham farm, in Greene

County, hundreds of former slaves led suit against white

landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be

compel ed to pay wages earned during the prior season's work.

Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it al

1,800 lawsuits filed by the freedmen.11

Despite Bibb County's remote location, far from any of the most

famous military campaigns, the Civil War had not been a distant

event. In the early months of ghting, Alabama industrialists

realized that the market for iron su cient for armaments would

become lucrative in the South. In 1860 only Tredegar Iron Works, a

vast industrial enterprise in Richmond, Virginia, driven by more

than 450 slaves and nearly as many free laborers, could produce

bat le-ready cannon for the South. The Confederate government,

almost from the moment of its creation, set out to spur additional

capacity to make arms, particularly in Alabama, where a nascent

iron and coal industry was already emerging and lit le ghting was

likely to occur. During the war, a dozen or more new iron furnaces

were put into blast in Alabama;12 by 1864, the state was pumping

out four times more iron than any other southern state.

Across Alabama, individual property holders—slaveholders

speci cal y— were aggressively encouraged to at empt primitive

industrial e orts to support the Confederate war e ort. The rebel

government o ered generous inducements to entrepreneurs and

large slave owners to devote their resources to the South's industrial

needs. With much of the major plantation areas of Mississippi

under constant federal harassment, thousands of slaves there were

without work. Slave owners wil ing to transport their black workers

to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid

conscription into the southern armies.

After seeing their homes and stockpiles of cot on burned, W H.

and Lewis Thompson, brothers from Hinds County, Mississippi, and

the owners of large numbers of slaves, moved to Bibb County

midway through the war to mine the Cahaba coal elds for the

Confederacy. They opened the Lower Thompson mine, and later

another relative and his slaves arrived to dig another mine. The coal

was hauled eleven miles to Ashby and then shipped to Selma. The

mining was crude, using picks and hand-pul ed carts. The slaves

drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the

surface.13

surface.

A neighbor of the Cot inghams, local farmer Oliver Frost,

regularly took his slaves to a cave on Six Mile Creek to mine

saltpeter—a critical ingredient for gunpowder—for the Confederate

army, often remaining there for weeks at a time. The Fancher

family, on a farm three miles north of the crossroads community

cal ed Six Mile, regularly hauled limestone from a quarry on their

property to a Bibb County furnace during the war.14

The centerpiece of the Alabama military enterprises was a

massive and heavily forti ed arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and

gunpowder mil located in the city of Selma. To produce its

weapons and metal plating for use on ironclad ships critical to the

Confederacy's limited naval operations, the Selma works relied on

enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby

Shelby and Bibb counties.15 Alabama iron was particularly wel

suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying

bat le ships with steel plates. Iron forged at Alabama's Cane Creek

Furnace, in Calhoun County, had been utilized for a portion of the

armor used to convert the hul of the captured USS Merrimac into

the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862,

bat le of ironclads.16 The Confederacy was hungry for as much of

the material as it could get.

Of particular strategic value were ironworks established by local

investors in 1862 in the vil age of Brier eld. Nine miles from the

Cot ing-ham place, the Brier eld Iron Works produced the plates

that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during

the bat le of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage

of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her

hul .17 Bibb County iron quickly became a coveted material.

As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever

increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brier eld

Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or

lease African Americans. Foundries routinely commissioned labor

agents to prowl across the southern states in search of available

slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

Brier eld operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control

its output. The purchase encompassed "its property of al kinds

whatsoever," including thousands of acres of land and a catalogue of

dozens of wagons, wheelbarrows, coal sleds, axes, and blacksmith

tools. On the list of livestock were seventy mules, forty-one oxen,

and nine black men: "John Anderson, aged about 35, Dennis, about

38, George, about 30, Charles, about 47, Perry, about 40, Curry

about 17, Mat hew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about

30 years."18

The Confederate government began construction of a second

furnace at the site shortly after acquiring the property. Al of its

output went to the Selma Arsenal, fty miles by railroad to the

south, where the iron was used for armor and for naval guns,

including the state-of-the-art eleven-inch Brooke ri ed cannon, with

a capacity of ring a 230-pound shel more than two thousand

yards.19

By the standards of the antebel um South, the Brier eld Iron

Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder. The adjacent vil age

held church in a schoolhouse surrounded by the tenements and

smal housing for three hundred workers. Two massive brick blast

furnaces, each forty feet high, belched a thick brew of smoke and

gases at the top and a torrent of lique ed iron at the base. Nearby

was a rol ing mil where the molten iron was formed into crude

one-hundred-pound "pigs" for shipment to Selma, and loaded onto

a railroad line extended into the factory yard. One hundred yards

away sat a kiln for ring limestone, ten tons of which was fed each

day into the furnaces. Beyond the kiln was a quarry for the endless

task of repairing the stone furnaces, a sawmil , and then seven

thousand acres of forest from which fuel for the constantly burning

fires was cut.20

The nine slaves owned by the ironworks were an anomaly. Few

industrial enterprises wanted to actual y purchase slaves. They were

too expensive at acquisition, and too costly and di cult to

maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become

maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become

uncooperative, or die. Far preferable to the slave-era industrialist

was to lease the slave chat el owned by other men.

In 1864, however, few such workers could be found anymore.

Instead, the Confederate o cer commanding the Brier eld iron

production operation, Maj. Wil iam Richardson Hunt, rented two

hundred slaves to perform the grueling tasks necessary to continue

equipping the rebel army.21 Late in the war, as the need for the

area's coal and iron capacity grew dire, the Confederate government

began to forcibly impress the slaves held by whites in the county. A

son of Rev. Starr's—a doctor and also a resident of the Cot ingham

Loop—became the government's agent for seizing slaves.22 There is

no surviving record of which black men were pressed into service.

But by war's end, Scipio Cot ingham, the sixty-three-year-old slave

who had shared the farm longest with master Elisha, had come to

identify himself as a foundry man. Almost certainly, he had been

among those rented to the Brier eld furnace and compel ed to help

arm the troops fighting to preserve his enslavement.

As the war years progressed, ever larger numbers of local men from

near the Cot ingham farm left for bat le duty. Two of Elisha's sons

fought for the Confederacy. Moses and James, both husbands and

fathers, each saw gruesome action, personal injury, and capture by

the Union. Elisha's grandson Oliver, too young to ght with the

troops, joined the Home Guard, the ragtag platoons of old men and

teenagers whose job was to patrol the roads for deserters, eeing

slaves, and Union scouts.

In the beginning, large crowds gathered at the stores in the

crossroads set lement of Six Mile to send them o , and groups of

women worked together to sew the uniforms they wore. Soldiers on

the move through the area were a regular sight, crossing the Cahaba

on the ferry near the mouth of Cot ingham Creek, and traversing the

main road from there toward the rail towns to the east.23

Confederate soldiers camped often on the Cot ingham farm,

stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the

stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the

plantation's supplies and food, exchanging spent horses for fresh

ones. At one point late in the war, an entire regiment set camp in

the field, erecting tents and lighting cooking fires.24

The appearance of Confederate soldiers must have been an

extraordinary event in the lives of the black members of the

Cot ingham clan. The war years were a con icted period of

confused roles for slaves. They were the subjects of the Union

army's war of liberation, and the victims of the South's economic

system. Yet at the same time, slaves were also servants and

protectors of their white masters. In the woods near the Cot ingham

home, slaves guarded the horses and possessions of their white

owners, hidden there to avoid raids of northern soldiers. Some

slaves took the opportunity to ee, but most stayed at their posts

until true liberation came in the spring of 1865.

The foundry and arsenal at Selma and the simple mines and

furnaces around the Cot ingham farm that supplied it with raw

materials had taken on outsized importance as the war dragged on.

The Alabama manufacturing network became the backbone of the

Confederacy's ability to make arms,25 as the Tredegar factories were

depleted of raw materials and skil ed workers and menaced by the

advancing armies of Ulysses S. Grant. Preservation of the Alabama

enterprises was a key element of a last-ditch plan by Je erson

Davis, the southern president, to retreat with whatever was left of

the Confederate military into the Deep South and continue the

war.26

For more than a year, Union forces in southern Tennessee and

northern Alabama massed for an anticipated order to obliterate any

continued capacity of a rump Confederate government to make

arms. Smal groups of horse soldiers made regular probing raids,

against minimal southern resistance. In April of 1864, Alabama's

governor wired Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of

rebel forces in Alabama and Mississippi, imploring him to send

additional troops. "The enemy's forces …are fortifying their position

with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the

with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the

forces wil work way South and destroy the valuable works in

Central Alabama…. Can nothing be done?"27

Final y in March 1865, a mass of 13,500 Union cavalrymen

swept down from the Tennessee border, in one of the North's

penultimate death blows to the rebel ion. Commanded by Gen.

James H. Wilson, the Union army, wel dril ed and amply armed,

split into three huge raiding parties, each assigned to destroy key

elements of Alabama's industrial infrastructure. Moving

unchal enged for days, the federal troops burned or wrecked iron

forges, mil s, and massive stockpiles of cot on and coal at Red

Mountain, Irondale, and Helena, north of Bibb County. On the