Slavery by Another Name (7 page)

it back.42 The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

it back. The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

against two bales of cot on from John C. Henry, the cot on buyer at

Randolph who had become the county's de facto banker and

nancier. She set led the debt after the harvest of 1870, but

immediately had to assume another loan.43

The Bishops, like Elisha and his family, were devout Wesleyan

Methodists.44 Along with their slaves, the Bishops had at ended the

Mount Zion church near their farm in the south end of the county,

where the family lived in a house over owing with daughters.45

The Bishops and Cot inghams, white and black, would have known

each other wel through the close-knit circles of the Methodist

circuit. John Wesley Starr, as a circuit-riding clergyman, was a

regular feature before both congregations. Elias Bishop had

accumulated an even more impressive col ection of slaves than

Elisha, with ten black men and three black females old enough to

work in the elds at the beginning of the war. A half dozen young

children rounded out the slave quarters. On the day of

emancipation in 1863, the Bishop slave girl named Mary, who ve

years later would become Henry Cot inham's wife, was fourteen.46

In the wake of the war, one episode in the lives of white

Cot inghams became the de ning anecdote of the family's su ering

and resurrection. Elisha's son Moses, who had migrated to Bienvil e

Parish, Louisiana, a few years before secession, lost his land and the

life of his wife, and had been forced to send his children on a

harrowing journey through the bat le zones of Mississippi with only

a slave and a geriatric preacher to protect them. The saga resonated

through generations of white Cot inghams and blacks descended

from their slaves.

After Moses enlisted in January 1862, his pregnant wife, Nancy

Katherine, grew il and then died during childbirth. Moses returned

home from the front to bury Nancy and make arrangements for

their six surviving children. Elisha Cot ingham sent a Baptist

minister to Louisiana to bring his grandchildren back to Alabama

for the duration of the war. With the southern railroad system

already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

the preacher and one of Moses’ two slaves, Joe, set out in an ox-

drawn wagon. "That was the hardest trial I had ever had to go

through, to leave my lit le children to be carried o to Alabama,"

Moses recounted to descendants years later.47

For three weeks, the odd expedition inched across the war-

disrupted South. The preacher and the old African American, a

scramble of children foraging for turnips and cornmeal, the oldest

daughter, Cirrenia, stil a child herself, feeding two-month-old

Johnny, the infant whose birth had kil ed their mother, with a gruel

of baked sweet potatoes. In November 1862, the ragged band

arrived at Elisha Cot ingham's farm on the Cahaba River. The fate of

Moses, stil at war, was unknown. "We never knew whether he was

dead or alive til one day, after the war was over, we saw him

coming," Cirrenia later wrote. Moses started over, reset ling on

nearby land along Copperas Creek, marrying the daughter of

another former slaveholding family and beget ing another seven

children.

The losses su ered by Moses and the slow rescue of his family in

the heat of war could have been a parable for how white

southerners perceived the destruction of the South they had known.

Physical and nancial devastation, death and grief, fol owed by a

transforming struggle to survive and rebuild. But the story also

underscored the terrifying vulnerability whites like the Cot inghams

discovered in being forced to place the fate and future of Moses’

family in the hands of a descendant of Africa. After the war, as the

Cot ingham slaves brazenly asserted their independence, the

journey of Joe and the children across the South came to symbolize

a reliance on blacks that southern whites could never again al ow.

Regardless of their intertwined pasts, the rehabilitation of the South

by whites would not just purposeful y exclude blacks. As time

passed and opportunity permit ed, former slaves would be

compel ed to perform the rebuilding of the South as wel — in a

system of labor hardly distinguishable in its brutality and coercion

from the old slavery that preceded it.

If one looked out from Elisha's porch in December 1868, across the

crop rows and down past the creek, the only green in a nearly

colorless winter landscape was in the short scru y needles of

twisted cedars he had planted long ago, along the wagon drive from

the road to the house. The slave cabins, nearly two dozen of them,

were mostly empty now. Even Scipio, the old man slave who had

worked Elisha's farm nearly as long as the white master himself,

was gone down the road. Already, weather and uselessness were

doing the shacks in.

Crisp brown leaves heaped at the feet of a line of high pines and

bare hickories that framed the boundaries of the main eld

between the river and the house. The wal s of yel ow limestone

rising up abruptly from the eastern bank of the Cahaba looked pale

and gray.

The big eld, long devoid of its hardwood forest, was striped

with lifeless rows of cot on stalks and corn husks standing against

the low, sharp-angled rays of winter sun. In every direction,

thousands of bedraggled slips of lint stil clung to broken cot on

bol s—wisps of that portion of the harvest that time and weather

and, in Elisha's mind, the obstinancy of "his Negroes" had conspired

to leave behind. Al winter long they would hang there, limp and

wet, layering the dead elds with a hazy whisper of white and

goading Elisha Cot ingham in their waste.

How di erently lay the land for Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop.

They had been reared on farms within a night's walk of the plain

country church where now they would marry, and the hil s and

elds and forests fanning out from the Cahaba eastward along Six

Mile Road had been the width and range of life to these two slaves.

Contrasted against that circumscribed existence, the extraordinary

events in the aftermath of emancipation—no mat er the deprivation

or arduousness—must have been bathed in a glow of wonder and

astonishment.

It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

civilized the Cahaba val ey and al of rugged central Alabama. Bibb

County was a place where there were no at places. A freshly

cleared tract of forest ground displayed a roiling surface of earth, a

scene more like swel s pitching in a rol ing sea than elds

beckoning the plow. It was the rst generation of slaves, like

Scipio, who hacked and burned the woods, sawing down the great

virgin forests, digging out and dragging away the stumps and stones

left behind, breaking by plow for the rst time the rich, root-

infested soil, smoothing and shaping the land for seed. For the

generations of slaves that fol owed, it was the traces of a mule-

drawn plow that de-marked the boundaries of hour upon hour

spent restraining the iron blade from plunging down hil sides or

struggling to drive it up the impossible inclines that fol owed.

As wel as Scipio and the black families that surrounded him had

come to know the shape and contours of the Cot ingham farm,

never, until wel into the years of war, had they even imagined the

possibility that they could someday own the land, grow their own

harvests, perhaps even control the government. Now, al those

things, or some luminous variant of them, seemed not just possible

but perhaps inevitable.

Whatever bit erness Elisha Cot ingham carried on the day of

Henry and Mary's wedding must have been more than surpassed by

the joy of the plantation's oldest former slave, Scipio, the

grandfather of Henry. Almost seventy years old yet as robust as a

man a third his age, Scip, as he was cal ed, had witnessed near

unearthly transformations of the world as he knew it. He had been

born in Africa, then wrenched as a child into the frontier of an

America only faintly removed from its eighteenth-century colonial

origins. Through decades spent clearing forest and planting virgin

elds, he watched as the unclaimed Indian land on which he found

himself evolved into a yet even more foreign place. In the early

years of the Cot ingham farm, Cherokee and Creek Indians stil

control ed the western bank of the Cahaba's sister stream, the Coosa

River. Choctaw territory extended to within fty miles of the

plantation.48 Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

plantation. Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

receded, and the frontier outposts swel ed into set lements and then

lit le, aspiration- l ed towns. As the Civil War years approached,

the Cot ingham plantation fel nal y into a steady rhythm of

stability and cot on-driven prosperity.

Whether the child who came to be a Cot ingham slave cal ed

Scipio knew the speci c place of his origins, who his parents were,

what African people they were a part of, how they came to be

compel ed across the Atlantic and into slavery—what his native

name had been—al was lost.

The erasure of his history was completed by the moniker placed

on him by white captors. Scipio was a classic slave name, one of a

catalogue of cynical, almost sneering, designations rooted in the

white South's popular fetish for the mythology of the classic

cultures. It came from the name of a second-century general who

governed Rome as Scipio Africanus. For the Roman Scipio, this was

a tribute to his victory over Hannibal in the year 201, extending

Roman control over Carthage and al of northern Africa. His reign

had also seen the brutal suppression of the rst great Roman slave

revolt, in which on one occasion more than twenty thousand

rebel ing slaves were cruci ed. The context of such a name might

have been lost on an African slave barred from learning Western

history, but to educated whites the mocking irony would have been

obvious.49

Scipio at least knew that he had been born in Africa, unlike

nearly every other slave that entered the Cot ingham farm, and that

he believed the year of his birth was 1802. Perhaps he came

directly to Cot ingham from an Atlantic slave ship. Possibly he was

rst enslaved in Virginia or North Carolina, and then resold to the

Deep South in the great domestic slave trading boom of the early

nineteenth century. Shipping manifests at the port of New Orleans

contain an entry for a teenage slave boy named Scipio arriving from

a plantation in Virginia in 1821. Whatever his origins, Scip would

hold de antly until the end of his life to his identity as an Africa-

born black man.50

born black man.

Even bound into the agony of a quotidian life of forced labor,

Scip must have conversely thril ed to the rise of the bountiful tribe

of men and women who sprang from his Atlantic passage. The

white people who brought him here had purchased other slaves,

particularly in his boyhood, and housed them in the quarter of log-

and-mud cabins down the hil from Elisha's house. But since Scip

had grown to manhood, it was he who had sired slave after slave.

First came George in 1825 (who would become the father of

Henry) and Jef in 1828. Then, in 1830, arrived Green, whose likely

namesake, born more than fty years later, would be delivered to

Slope No. 12 mine in 1908.

They were al sturdy boys, and as much as any man might expect

in a hard life. But in the nal years before the Civil War, Scip

surprised any of the other freed slaves who might have thought old

age was set ing upon him. He took up with Charity, a teenage girl

almost forty years his junior. Whether the union was coerced or by

choice, it was consummated in slavery and continued in a sweet

freedom. Charity would stay with Scip until the end of his long life,

deep into the years of emancipation, and for nearly twenty years

bear to him sons and daughters with the regularity of cot on bol s