Slavery by Another Name (3 page)

of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure

entries in the public record o er details of a forced labor system of

monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over

decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands

of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of

probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this

net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than

twice that gure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original

records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential

charges or for violations of laws speci cally written to intimidate blacks—

changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a

ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women.

Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to

rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of

crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the

South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-

time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers

became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob

violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return

of forced labor as a xture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives

of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in

which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete

racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically

chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible

forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly recon gured to make

one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with

the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that

1901 also marked the nal full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks

throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local

mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white

business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments.

Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were

rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured

the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama,

Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South

Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United

States then lived.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth

century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to ourish

in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with

thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories

and mines in the 1850s were also the rst to employ forced African American

labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing

slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves,

and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict

leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment

employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against

"slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed

such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These

were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that su ocated the

aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached

the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an

explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin

much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of

his life.

Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the

rising southern white assault on black independence—even as black leaders

increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for

help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of

white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the role of blacks in

U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have

to accept the end of freedom.

On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the

White House from Carrie Kinsey a barely literate African American woman in

Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been

abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no

interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the

illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing

for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast

majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at

the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case

12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the

National Archives.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—

was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of

blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or

African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not

fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound

global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the rst time

since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior

to the Civil War.

That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow

of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to

the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of

millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate,

comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that

enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve

their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the

United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast

majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive.

There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a

Pratt Mines burial eld. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their

existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book—

especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most

interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented

details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the

place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story

gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common

slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves

versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced

labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had

been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he

produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that

steeped the place and era of Green Cot-tenham's birth; of the obliterating

forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could

the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single,

anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and

unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's

most authentic and compelling dimension.

Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the

boundaries of the burial eld, considering even without bene t of his words

the sti ed horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended

through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that

Cottenham belonged as the central gure of this narrative. The slavery that

survived long past emancipation was an o ense permitted by the nation,

perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving

thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but

every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every

direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the

time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what

happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to

orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of

the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black

man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this

book.

I

THE WEDDING

Fruits of Freedom

Freedom wasn't yet three years old when the wedding day came.

Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop had been chat el slaves until

the momentous nal days of the Civil War, as nameless in the

eyes of the law as cows in the eld. Al their lives, they could no

more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a

wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a nal

furious sweep of Union soldiers—in a bewildering blur of

liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war—ravaged the

Cahaba River val ey.

Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no

more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr,

the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his

Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation

of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people

that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.

To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly

seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry.

In every direction from the Cot ingham Loop, the simple dirt road

alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their

former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bit er.

The val ey, the undulating hil s of Bibb County, even the bridges

and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down

from the last foothil s of the Appalachians and into the at fertile

plains to the south, were stil wrecked from the savage cavalry raids

of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April

1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in bil owing

swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scat ered

before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius

Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last

functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama