Slavery by Another Name (6 page)

morning of March 30, Union soldiers slogged down the rain-

drenched roads into Columbiana, destroying the machinery of the

Shelby Iron Works, shoving its equipment into local wel s and

streams, and freeing the slaves critical to its operations.

Against nearly hopeless odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former

slave dealer who had become the South's most storied horseman,

met the blue advance at a point south of the town of Monteval o.

Skirmishing along Mahan Creek, just miles from the Cot ingham

farm, Forrest's disorganized command could only harass Wilson's

advance. Northern troops took the Brier eld furnace on March 31,

and left it a ruin.

Outmanned and outfought, with ooding creeks blocking his

maneuvers, Forrest, himself slashed by a saber in savage ghting on

April 1, retreated for a nal stand at Selma. The next day, Wilson's

troops charged the fortified industrial complex in Selma, and routed

Forrest's remaining four thousand men. The Confederate general

slipped away with an escort of one hundred soldiers, massacring as

he made his escape most of a contingent of twenty- ve sleeping

Union scouts he stumbled upon in a field.

Federal forces captured nearly three thousand of Forrest's men,

along with more than sixty pieces of eld cannon, scores of heavy

artil ery guns, nine factories, ve major iron forges, three foundries,

twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and

twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and

35,000 bales of cot on. The arsenal, factory shops, and foundries at

Selma were systematical y destroyed. Perhaps most shocking to

local whites, before moving on to at ack Georgia, Wilson's o cers

quickly raised a one-thousand-man regiment of black troops, placed

under the command of the Third Ohio Cavalry28

With the remaining Confederate armies commanded by Gen.

Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unable to unite,

Je erson Davis's hope to continue the rebel ion as a guerril a

struggle col apsed. Cut o from his remaining troops, his Alabama

munitions system destroyed, deprived of the last regions of relative

security in the South, he at empted to ee to Texas or Mexico.

Under hot pursuit by detachments of General Wilson's troops, he

was captured by Union forces in Georgia weeks later. The war

came final y to its end.

Alabama had su ered losses totaling $500 mil ion—a sum

beyond comprehension in 1865. The total value of farm property

was reduced during the war from $250 mil ion to less than $98

mil ion, including the loss of slaves. Al banks in the state had

col apsed. Agricultural production levels would not match that of

1860 for another forty years.29

But the nal days of the war proved to be only the beginning of a

more inexorable and anarchic struggle. A vicious white insurgency

against the Union occupation and the specter of black citizenship

began to take shape, presaged by the conduct of Home Guard

patrols like the one Oliver Cot ingham had joined. The patrols,

uncoordinated and increasingly contemptuous of any authority

during the war, had come to be known more as bandits and thugs

than defenders of the Confederacy. After four years of conscriptions

verging on kidnappings, violence perpetrated against critics of

rebel ion, and ruthless seizures of supplies and property, the Home

Guard was in many places as despised as the Yankee troops. But in

the aftermath of a sudden—and in much of the South, unanticipated

—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic

—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic

a airs of places too smal or remote to warrant a detachment of

northern troops. In the Deep South, that meant nearly everyplace

outside state capitals and economic centers.

The result, in the two years preceding Henry and Mary's wedding,

was a spreading wave of internecine violence and thievery by

returning Confederate soldiers, particularly against those

southerners who had doubted the war. Deserters, who had been far

more numerous than southern mythology acknowledged, began

set ling old scores. The increasing lawlessness of the postwar years

was, rather than a wave of crime by freed slaves as so often

claimed, largely perpetrated against whites by other whites.

The Cot ingham farm sat in the middle of this unrest. One gang of

deserters in Bibb County, made up of men believed to have

abandoned the armies of both the North and the South, cal ed

themselves the Uglies, and marauded through the countryside

during the war, robbing farms and threatening Confederate

supporters. Another gang inhabited the Yel ow Leaf swamp on the

border with adjoining Chilton County. A paramilitary band of men

near the town of Monteval o, cal ing itself Blackwel 's Cavalrymen,

hunted the countryside for Confederate deserters before the

southern surrender and continued as an outlaw gang after the war.

The group eventual y murdered a total of seventeen local men.

White lawlessness was so rampant in Shelby County that less than a

year before Henry and Mary's wedding, Union military o cials in

the Alabama capital threatened to send troops into the area to

restore peace.30

Chilton County had been a hotbed of such guerril a activity

throughout the war and emerged as a refuge for Confederate

deserters and southerners who remained loyal to the Union. A local

plantation owner, Capt. James Cobb, who had been sent home

from duty with the southern army due to poor health, was assigned

the task of breaking up the gangs of deserters. The e ort spawned

vendet as that would outlast the war. On June 3, 1865, nearly two

months after the surrender, Cobb was seized by a group of thirty

whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they

whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they

ransacked his home, kil ing or stealing his livestock. The former

Confederate o cer was accused of having named seven of the

mob's members as deserters. The Blackwel group subsequently

captured the seven and summarily executed them.31

Of the handful of Union soldiers sent to Bibb County to oversee a

nominal local court system during the rst two years after the war,

one was kil ed on a Centrevil e street corner by a Confederate

veteran wielding an axe handle.32 Two agents of the Freedmen's

Bureau were assigned to the area in January and February of 1866.

The men, named Beard and Higgen-botham, were promptly

whipped by local whites and driven from the county. Not long

after, rumor spread that two former slaves named Tom Johnson

and Rube Russel had been seen around the county sporting ne

clothes paid for by Freedmen's Bureau agents. The emancipated

slaves planned to "live like white folks and marry white wives,"

according to a newspaper account. Johnson was promptly hanged

from a tree on Market Street. A few mornings later, passersby found

Russel dangling dead, in a tree not far from the scene of the earlier

lynching.33

Yet even as southern whites like those in Bibb County made their

rejection of the new order so apparent, no alternative was clear

either. The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the

Cot inghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with

scores or hundreds of slaves, not just nancial y but intel ectual y

bereft. The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cot on

production on most farms; in many cases it was slaves who directed

the gangs of other slaves in their daily work. Slavery had been

introduced into the southern colonies in the 1600s with the

argument that whites, operating alone, were incapable of large-

scale cot on production. The concepts of sharecropping and farm

tenancy hadn't yet evolved. The notion that their farms could be

operated in some manner other than with groups of black laborers

compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as

compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as

twenty hours a day was antithetical to most whites.

Moreover, the sudden wil ingness of mil ions of black laborers to

insolently demand cash wages and other requirements to secure

their labor was an almost otherworldly experience for whites such

as Elisha Cot ingham. Former slaves were suddenly mobile too,

seeking new lodging away from the farms of their slave lives and

at empting to put white farmers into competition with one another

for their work.

In the absence of any means to supply freed slaves with land, the

Freed-men's Bureau and northern military commanders stationed in

the South encouraged blacks to enter into labor contracts with

whites. The results were writ en agreements between whites and

black farmhands l ed with provisions aimed at restoring the

subjugated state of African Americans. One agent of the Freedmen's

Bureau wrote that whites were unable to fathom that work "could

be accomplished without some prodigious binding and obligating

of the hireling to the employer."34

Some white plantation owners at empted to coerce their former

slaves into signing "lifetime contracts" to work on the farms. In one

South Carolina case in 1865, when four freedmen refused such

agreements, two were kil ed and a third, a woman, was tortured.35

More common were year-to-year contracts that obligated black

workers to remain throughout a planting and harvest season to

receive their ful pay, and under which they agreed to

extraordinarily onerous limitations on personal freedom that

echoed slave laws in e ect before emancipation. They agreed not to

leave the landowner's property without a writ en pass, not to own

rearms, to obey al commands of the farmer or his overseer, to

speak in a servile manner, and in the event of a violation of the

rules to accept whatever punishment the farmer deemed

appropriate—often the lash.36 Most of the early contracts adopted

in the South in 1865 and 1866 were dissolved by commanders of

the occupying Union troops. But they framed a strategy that

southern whites would return to again and again.

southern whites would return to again and again.

When Elisha's sons arrived home from the war, they found only

the barest gleanings of the earlier time with which to restart their

lives. The thriving farmland world of their boyhoods no longer

existed. After four years of steadily in ated Confederate scrip, now

entirely worthless, the value of a man's land and tools, even of a

bale of cot on, was nearly unknowable. Elisha's property was worth

the substantial sum of nearly $20,000 before the war. The great

bulk of that was invested in his slaves, and now they were his no

more. The Cot inghams had not even the cash to buy cot on seed

and corn, much less the labor of the former slaves they had so

recently owned.

In February 1868, Elisha, perhaps sensing his own mortality more

acutely in the postwar chaos, began dividing much of the plantation

among his four sons, John, James, Moses, and Harry37 At the same

time, his daughter, Rebecca Bat le, bought two hundred acres of the

property for $600.38

Later that month, Moses Cot ingham borrowed $120 from a

cot on buyer in the town of Randolph, an outpost in the other end

of the county on the edge of the wide-open cot on lands of southern

Alabama. For col ateral, Moses promised two ve-hundred-pound

bales of cot on at the end of the season.39 From another man, he

borrowed $120, securing that note with one six-year-old mule and a

ten-year-old horse.40 The fol owing January, 1869, Moses borrowed

again, mortgaging for $150 his ever older horse and three other

mules. The crop that fal wouldn't be enough to pay o the loan,

and Moses couldn't clear his debt until 1871.41

A sense of paralysis was pervasive among whites. Elias Bishop, a

prosperous farmer with a spread of several hundred acres under

plow in another rich bend of the Cahaba downstream from the

Cot inghams, was in similar straits. In the fal of 1869, Bishop,

South Carolina-born and another of the county's earliest set lers,

borrowed a lit le more than $50 against one hundred bushels of

corn and mortgaged a portion of his land for $37.60. He never paid