Slavery by Another Name (4 page)

in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the val ey

remained a twisted ruin. Fal ow elds. Burned barns. Machinery

rusting at the bot oms of wel s. Horses and mules dead or lost. The

people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.

From the front porch of Elisha Cot ingham's house, two stories

stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the

river's edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren

vista. The land had long ago lost nearly al resemblance to the

massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fty

years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of

its careful y tended bounty of the last years before the war.

He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded

from the house in one long sheet of soil, fal ing gradual y away

from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly ve hundred yards,

the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when

Elisha rst arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and

south, the great eld was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up

over turtle-shel shapes of limestone protruding from the banks,

growing deeper and wider, fal ing faster and more furiously—strong

enough to spin a smal grist mil —before it turned to the west and

suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cot ing-

ham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the

place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a

resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.

Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cot ingham, like countless

other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of

an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times

constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society

they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and

humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for

generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical

spectrum of possibilities for what might yet fol ow, Elisha had to

consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

human e ort invested at the con uence of Cot ingham Creek and

the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their

achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last

Cot ingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave

cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the elds hacked

from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached

gravestones clustered atop the hil stil bore the Cot ingham name.

Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself,

in an Alabama territory that was stil untamed. It was 1817, and

Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by

the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American

nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would

ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Paci c

Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.

Elisha's brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded

county seat of Centrevil e, where in short order shal ow-draft

riverboats would land and a trading center would be established.2

Another brother, Wil iam, moved farther south. But Elisha and his

younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In

the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought

in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and

planted season upon season of cot on. The engines of their

enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported

them to Alabama and later bred more themselves—including Henry

—from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic

slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of

ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising

"Negroes for Sale." Manning farms strung along a looping wagon

road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins,

and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black

labor to the rich black land, the Cot ingham brothers became

prosperous and comfortable.

Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

Prat 's Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba

and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the

Cot inghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of

Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had fel ed the

rst timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work

not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled

into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water,

imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the

Cot inghams, this place was Riverbend.

The Cot inghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their

bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous

investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especial y in contrast to

the industrial slavery that would eventual y bud nearby, life on the

Cot ingham plantation re ected the biblical understanding that

cruelty to any creature was a sin—that black slaves, even if not

quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.

Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings,

Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins

built of rough-hewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock

replaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded

the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in

their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single

twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two

young boys and a seven-year-old girl.3

Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha's grandson

Oliver, raised there on the Cot ingham farm, would have been a

lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named

Henry4 When Elisha Cot ing-ham's daughter Rebecca married a

neighbor, Benjamin Bat le, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a

wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and

servant. "In consideration of the natural love and a ection which I

bear to my daughter," Elisha wrote, I give her "a certain negro girl

named Frances, about 14 years old."5

Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a

few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870—

clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger

human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his

slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who

ministered to al of the souls on the Cot ingham place. The Starr

family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant

dead, was set down the hil and toward the road, even more

vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.

Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation

still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cot ingham

master— giving permission to marry to a favored mulat o named

Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha's side past

emancipation and until the old master's death, would become the

namesake of Henry and Mary's youngest son.

But even as Elisha had al owed a strain of tenderness to co-reside

with the brutal y circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost

sight of their fundamental de nition—as cat le. They were creatures

bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to

daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate

in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one

slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought

him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify,

his newlywed daughter received al "future increase of the girl."6

The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one

year his junior, in 1868 was the rst among Cot ingham people,

black or white, in two seasons. Another slave, Albert, had wed, and

left for good in the middle of the rst picking time after the

destruction of the war—amid the chaos and uncertainty when no

one could be sure slavery had truly ended.7 Albert didn't wait to

find out.

Now, two years later, the coming marriage surely warmed Elisha

at some level. But as Henry prepared to take a wife and become a

man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

forged—everything on which that gift to his daughter twenty years

before had been predicated— hung in the fragile limbo of a

transformed social order. Whatever satisfaction the lial ties gave

the white master at the wedding of his former bondsman would

have been tempered by the poverty and grief that had

overwhelmed him.

Most of Elisha's slaves remained nearby. Some stil worked his

property, for wages or a share of the cot on crop. But the end of the

war had left the white Cot inghams at a point of near desolation.

The hard winter threatened to bring them to their knees.

As Henry and Mary's wedding approached in 1868, whites across

the South strained to accept the apparently inevitable ignominies

descending from the war. The loss of fortunes, the war's blood and

sorrow, the humiliation of Union soldiers encamped in their towns,

al these things whites had come to bear. They would bear them a

lit le longer, at least until the instant threats of hunger and military

force receded.

But these abominations paled against the specter that former

slaves, with their huge mathematical majorities in Louisiana,

Mississippi, southern Alabama, south Georgia, and South Carolina,

would soon vote and rule governments and perhaps take their

masters’ lands. This vision was a horror almost beyond

contemplation. It poisoned the air for Elisha and other white

landowners with prospects for even greater disaster.

In the last days of ghting, the U.S. Congress had created the

Freed-men's Bureau to aid the South's emancipated slaves.8 New

laws gave the agency the power to divide land con scated by the

federal government and to have "not more than forty acres of such

land …assigned" to freedmen and black war refugees for a period of

three years. Afterward, the law said former slaves would be al owed

to purchase the property to hold forever. President Andrew

Johnson rescinded the provision a few months later, but

emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

northern soldiers stil garrisoned across the region would eventual y

parcel out to them al or part of the land on which they had long

toiled.

The threat that Elisha's former slaves would come to own his

plantation—that he and his family would be landless, stripped of

possessions and outnumbered by the very creatures he had bred and

raised—was palpable.

The last desperate ral ying cal s of the Confederacy had been

exhortations that a Union victory meant the political and economic

subjugation of whites to their black slaves. In one of the final acts of

the Confederate Congress, rebel legislators asserted that defeat

would result in "the con scation of the estates, which would be

given to their former bondsmen."9

Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by

Gen. Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman to 400,000 acres of rich

plantation land in South Carolina early in 1865. It was unclear

whether blacks would be able to retain any of the property, but

rumor ared anew among blacks across the South the next year at

Christmastime—the end of the annual crop season—that plantation

land everywhere would soon be distributed among them. The U.S.

Congress debated such a plan openly in 1867, as it drew up the

statutes to govern Reconstruction in the southern states. And again

as harvest time ended that year, word whipped through the