Slavery by Another Name (11 page)

In 1862, the Shelby Works contracted with the Confederate

government to produce the vast quantity of twelve thousand tons of

iron a year for the war e ort, e ectively placing the operation

under the control of the Confederate chief of ordnance in

Richmond, Col. Josiah Gorgas, and his iron agent at the rebel

arsenal and munitions factory in Selma, Col. Colin J. McRae. For

the course of the war, the Shelby Works at empted to keep its

furnaces in near constant blast—producing huge quantities of iron

to be shipped to gun barrel makers in Mississippi and Georgia,34

and to the cannon and plate armor manufacturers at Selma. A

second furnace was added in 1863 to boost the war ef ort.35

With most of the white male population already mustered or

conscripted into ghting units, the company's only option for

ful l ing its obligations was to rely almost entirely on slaves.

Borrowing from the practices of railroads and the few other

industrial systems already familiar to businessmen of the South, the

Shelby Works quickly came to rely on "leased" slave labor that

would prove both extraordinarily ef ective and resilient.

To procure the slaves, the Shelby Works hired a labor agent

named John M. Til man to lease African Americans from plantation

owners in central Alabama, northeastern Mississippi, and eastern

Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as

Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as

possible, and the feed corn to feed both the four-legged and two-

legged creatures he col ected.36

Leased slave laborers typical y cost $120 a year near the

beginning of the war, but their cost more than doubled by the crisis

years of 1864 and 1865. Slaves with a particularly useful skil , such

as carpentry or prior iron-making experience, fetched $500 or more

per year. The great majority were men aged twenty to forty- ve,

engaged in the back-breaking work of cut ing timber in nearby

forests and digging iron ore and limestone. They were

supplemented by a much smal er number of women and their

children who performed menial tasks such as cooking and cleaning.

Soon, Ware was the master of between 350 and 400 slaves. His

company remained hungry for more.37

Ware's slaves worked under the control of a white overseer,

mostly in gangs of men assigned to speci c tasks. Under terms of

the contracts, owners received quarterly payments, and their slaves

were provided with basic food, clothing, and shelter. If a slave

escaped, it was the responsibility of the company to pay a fee for

the slave's arrest and return to the ironworks. As an incentive to

work hard and fol ow rules, slaves were permit ed to earn smal

amounts of cash for themselves—typical y less than $5 a month—by

agreeing to perform extra tasks such as tending the furnace at night,

cut ing extra wood, or digging additional ore.38

The company overseer, cal ed "boss" or "captain" by the slaves,

was not empowered to severely discipline the leased slaves in his

charge. Punishment remained the province of the owner. When

slaves at empted to ee, stole, or refused the orders of the overseer,

Shelby Works wrote the owner for instructions on how to handle

his property. The punishments meted out by plantation masters to

the slaves who worked under their direct employ were often harsh

in the extreme, even torturous by modern sensibilities. But few

slave masters encouraged the forge operators to treat their valued

stock with brutality, particularly when the e ciency of the slave

had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at

had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at

Christmas reported to their owners that the managers of the

ironworks had abused them often were not made available to the

company again. Moreover, slaves with wives stil living back at the

plantations from which they had come were al owed to return

home periodical y, sometimes several times a year.

Industrialists were embracing the same practices across the South.

An advertisement placed by the Empire State Iron and Coal Mining

Company of Trenton, Georgia, in the Huntsvil e, Alabama,

Confederate in 1863 sought to "hire or buy, 100 able-bodied hands,

to be employed at their works … 20 miles southwest of

Chat anooga."39

In 1862, an Alabama engineer named John T Milner and his

business partner, Frank Gilmer, convinced the Confederate

government to nance the construction of a blast furnace on Red

Mountain in Je erson County to produce iron for the war e ort.

The plant, constructed and operated primarily by slaves, marked

the birth of the vast industrial complex that would surround the

new city of Birmingham by the end of the century. By the time the

Red Mountain furnace was in operation in 1863, Milner and Gilmer

had also opened a complex of mines operated with slave labor near

the town of Helena, Alabama.40 Within a decade after the war, the

Helena mines would be manned entirely by convict forced laborers

and set an early standard for the depredations against ostensibly

emancipated African Americans.

Everywhere in the South that could produce coal or iron during

the war, southern industrialists were being pressured to increase

production at existing mines and furnaces, or to seize and reopen

idled business. In a move that would hang ominously over the

descendants of the Cot ingham slaves, southern industrialists in

1861 took over a mining company near Tracy City, Tennessee,

previously control ed by a syndicate of northern investors.

With the outbreak of war, the formerly New York-control ed

mines of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. were placed in the

hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,

hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,

the southerner who took over management of the company in

1861, immediately placed forty slaves in the concern's Sewanee

Mines. He was quickly pleased with their performance, tel ing a

newspaper reporter: "In a few months they were doing good service

and not one of the party failed in the ef ort to learn to dig coal."41

The business would become the largest commercial enterprise in

the South, and a half century later the largest subsidiary of U.S.

Steel, and the company that would acquire Scip's grandson Green

Cot enham four decades later.

To the enterprising industrialists who would reshape the southern

economy in the half century after the Civil War, the new concepts

of industrialized black labor had taken rm hold. Long before the

end of chat el slavery, Milner was in the vanguard of that new

theory of industrial forced labor. In 1859, he wrote that black labor

marshaled into the regimented productivity of factory set ings

would be the key to the economic development of Alabama and

the South. Milner believed that white people "would always look

upon and treat the negro as an inferior being." Nonetheless—indeed

for that very reason—blacks would serve a highly useful purpose as

the clever mules of an industrial age, "provided he has an overseer

—a Southern man, who knows how to manage negroes."42 Milner's

intuition that the future of blacks in America rested on how whites

chose to manage them, whether in slavery or out of it, would

resonate through the next half century of national discourse about

the proper role of the descendants of Africa in American life.

Milner was no mere theorist. He was a dogged executor of his

vision. It was men like Milner who would seize the opportunity

presented by convict leasing to reclaim slavery from the destruction

of the Civil War. As Alabama began sel ing its black prisoners in

large numbers in the 1870s, he scrambled to acquire al that were

available—plunging them by the hundreds into a hel ish coal

operation cal ed the Eureka mines, and later il egal y sel ing

hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal

hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal

mine, to the Georgia Pacific Railroad Co.

In every set ing that Milner employed convict slaves in the late

nineteenth century, he and his business associates subjected the

workers to almost animalistic mistreatment—a revivi cation of the

most atrocious aspects of antebel um bondage. Records of Milner's

various mines and slave farms in southern Alabama owned by one

of his business partners—a cousin to an investor in the Bibb Steam

Mil —tel the stories of black women stripped naked and whipped,

of hundreds of men starved, chained, and beaten, of workers

perpetual y lice-ridden and barely clothed.

Milner took center stage in Alabama's new industrialization,

urging southerners to "go to work…eradicating the diseases that are

destroying us." Part of that eradication would be to successful y re-

regiment freed slaves. "I am clearly of the opinion, from my own

observation, that negro labor can be made exceedingly pro table in

rol ing mil s," Milner had writ en of steel production in 1859. "I

have long since learned that negro slave labor is more reliable and

cheaper for any business connected with the construction of a

railroad than white."43

Milner and others had seen his theory of the black slave as an

e ective industrial forced worker vividly ful l ed during the war.

The system emerging with the end of Reconstruction would mimic

it repeatedly. African Americans driven by the right men, in the

correct ways, could be the engines of far more complex enterprises

than the old bourbon-soaked planters would ever have believed

possible. Black laborers might not quite be men, the industrialists

reasoned, but they recognized that African Americans were far more

than apes. The renting of slaves, as much as anything, had taught

them that masses of black laborers brought under temporary control

of a commercial enterprise could be powerful y leveraged in

commerce.

The at itudes among southern whites that a resubjugation of

African Americans was an acceptable—even essential—element of

solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The

solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The

desire of white farmers to recapture their former slaves through

new civil laws was transparent. In the immediate wake of

emancipation, the Alabama legislature swiftly passed a measure

under which the orphans of freed slaves, or the children of blacks

deemed inadequate parents, were to be "apprenticed" to their

former masters. The South Carolina planter Henry Wil iam Ravenel

wrote in September 1865: "There must… be stringent laws to

control the negroes, & require them to ful l their contracts of

labour on the farms."44

With the southern economy in ruins, state o cials limited to the

barest resources, and county governments with even fewer, the

concept of reintro-ducing the forced labor of blacks as a means of

funding government services was viewed by whites as an inherently

practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and

returning blacks to their appropriate position in society. Forcing

convicts to work as part of punishment for an ostensible crime was

clearly legal too; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,

adopted in 1865 to formal y abolish slavery, speci cal y permit ed

involuntary servitude as a punishment for "duly convicted"

criminals.

Beginning in the late 1860s, and accelerating after the return of

white political control in 1877, every southern state enacted an

array of interlocking laws essential y intended to criminalize black

life. Many such laws were struck down in court appeals or through

federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures

on black life quickly appeared to replace them. Few laws

speci cal y enunciated their applicability only to blacks, but it was

widely understood that these provisions would rarely if ever be

enforced on whites. Every southern state except Arkansas and

Tennessee had passed laws by the end of 1865 outlawing vagrancy

and so vaguely de ning it that virtual y any freed slave not under

the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime. An

1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to