Slavery by Another Name (81 page)

the violent white supremacists. (For the record, I did not win the contest.)

Afterward, despite the turmoil of that day, my mother, Sarah Avery

Blackmon, urged me to " nish the story" on Strike City—to go back and talk to

even more participants, to get to the bottom of what happened in 1965, to

study the results of that incident on the people involved and the community

surrounding it. I have been doing so ever since—for thirty years attempting to

plumb the forgotten or withheld chapters of history that shape the ever larger

communities that have fascinated me. Slavery by Another Name still doesn't

nish the story, but with the help of many extraordinary friends, colleagues,

historians, and researchers, it hopefully begins to bridge a gaping omission in

American history.

The book, and the July 21, 2001, article in The Wall Street Journal that

preceded it, would never have occurred without the guidance and passion of

Jack Bergstresser, director of the museum at Tannehill Ironworks Historical

State Park in McCalla, Alabama.

The research for this book has also been made much easier by the expert

sta s of the departments of history and archives in Alabama, Georgia,

Mississippi, and Arkansas, the Atlanta History Center, and countless clerks,

sheri s, and local historical society volunteers in county seats across Alabama,

Georgia, and Florida. Of particular help were Jim Baggett, director of the

Birmingham Public Library Archives, and Bobby Joe Seales, the indefatigable

president of the Shelby County Historical Society, where I spent many days

over many years. The sta s of the libraries of Emory University in Atlanta,

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the Harry Ransom Center at

the University of Texas at Austin were gracious and patient with my overlong

borrowings from their shelves and searches for obscure images. My thanks as

well to A. S. Williams III, of Birmingham, who generously granted access to his

unrivaled private collection of materials related to Alabama history.

I am also indebted to the many historians and scholars whose work guided

aspects of my research. Pete Daniel, curator in the Division of Work and

Industry at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, who in

1972 authored the seminal work on twentieth-century peonage in the South,

was kind enough to share a dinner and wise suggestions with me midway

through the project. For the years prior to 1900, no work rivals the research of

Mary Ellen Curtin, now a lecturer at the University of Essex, and the author of

Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900. My e ort on this book

was also inspired by the incomparable southern historian Dan T. Carter, now

at the University of South Carolina, whose 1964 thesis on convict leasing set

the groundwork for dozens of historians who have followed.

The book would never have been completed without the support of many

colleagues and editors, especially at The Wall Street Journal. My editor, John

Blanton, sharpened and elevated the original story. Managing editor Paul E.

Steiger o ered invaluable support for that article, as well as all of my other

work at the Journal since then and for the completion of this book. The

reporters of the Journal's Atlanta bureau have inspired me with their devotion

and talent—especially in their unrivaled coverage of hurricanes in recent

years. My fellow journalists and friends Nikhil Deogun, Rick Brooks, Glenn

Ru enach, Ken Wells, Catherine Williams, Carrie Teegardin, and Ken Foskett

have pushed me forward many times. I was often inspired by the late Manuel

Maloof and my wise friend Angelo Fuster. My thanks as well to Doubleday's

Bill Thomas, who suggested that I write this book; Stacy Creamer, the editor

who has gently asked for it ever since then; and David Black, my agent and

friend.

Finally, even though it is a writer's cliché, I am most grateful to my family

for their unwavering enthusiasm and patience for this project. This book has

hovered, a seemingly immovable background, over every weekend, holiday, and

beach trip in most of my remarkable son Michael's young life and for every

one of them in my extraordinary daughter Colette's. Yet they have urged me on

without fail and with my only penance being a periodic update to their

classmates. My wife, Michelle Jones Blackmon, has supported and assisted me

in more ways than I could ever record here while at the same time founding

and nurturing the amazing neighborhood school where our children learn.

This book is dedicated to them, Michelle, Michael, and Lettie.

NOTES

Abbreviations:

ADAH

Alabama Department of Archives and History,

Montgomery,

Ala.

AHC

Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Ga.

BCC

Bibb County Courthouse, Centrevil e, Ala.

Birmingham Public Library Archives, Birmingham,

BPLA

Ala.

BTW Papers Booker T. Washington Papers, Volumes 1-14

National Archives, Regional Records Center, East

EPRRC

Point, Ga.

Georgia Department of Archives and History,

GDAH

Atlanta, Ga.

NA

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Department of Justice, Peonage Files, Record Group

RG60, NA

60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

SCHS

Shelby County Historical Society, Columbiana, Ala.

TCC

Tal apoosa County Courthouse, Dadevil e, Ala.

1. "Sheriff's Prisoners Register," 1906-1910, SCHS.

2. Willie Clarke, Leroy Bandy, Verdell Wade, interviews by the author with former

miners and witnesses, January 2002.

3. Ibid.

4. Carrie Kinsey to Theodore Roosevelt, July 31, 1903, RG60, NA.

1. Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818–

1918 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 15.

2. Deed of Sarah Cotard to Charles Cottingham, Dec. 5, 1825; deed of Malcolm

McCray to Charles Cottingham, Jan. 8, 1831, BCC. In 1825, Charles Cottingham

paid $200 for land and lots in the town of Centreville. In 1831, he bought more

property on the east side of the Cahaba River.

3. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United

States, 1860. East Side Cahaba River (Free Inhabitants), Bibb, Alabama, p. 157.

4. Anna Blanche Cottingham, The Cottingham's of Bibb County: Vol. 1 (Ada, Okla.:

Pontotoc County Historical and Genealogical Society, 1970), p. 10.

5. Deed of Elisha Cottingham to Rebecca Battle, May 22, 1852, BCC.

6. Ibid.

7. Marriage license of Albert Cottingham and Laura Pratt, Sept. 8, 1866, by J.W.

Starr, Bibb County Marriages, SCHS, F-115.

8. Congress enacted a bill on March 3, 1865, creating the Bureau of Refugees,

Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, with a mandate to provide food, clothing, and

other assistance to victims of the Civil War, white and black.

9. Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1993), p. 101.

10. See Edward Magdol, “Local Black Leaders in the South, 1867–1875: An Essay

Toward the Reconstruction of Reconstruction History,” Societas—A Review of

Social History 4 (Spring 1974), cited in Royce, pp. 103–5.

11. Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 48.

12. James R. Bennett, Old Tannehill: A History of the Pioneer Ironworks in Roupes

Valley (1829–1865) (Birmingham: Je erson County Historical Commission, 1986),

pp. 27–28.

13. Ethel Armes, “Adventures in Early Iron Country,” 1910, SCHS.

14. Doris Fancher Farrington, unpublished typescript of oral history, in possession

of author, n.d.

15. David L. Nolen, “Wilson's Raid on the Coal and Iron Industry in Shelby County”

(thesis, University of Alabama in Birmingham, Spring 1988), pp. 2–3.

16. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 22.

17. Ibid., p. 26.

18. Deed of purchase by the Confederate States of America of Bibb County Iron

Co., Sept. 7, 1863, BCC.

19. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 29.

20. Joseph Hodgson, ed., The Alabama Manual and Statistical Register for 1869

(Montgomery: Montgomery Daily Mail, 1869), p. 105.

21. Advertisement in The Sunday Mississippian, Jan. 24, 1864, ADAH.

22. Ellison, p. 134.

23. Eugenia Wallace Logan, copy of typescript of oral history, in possession of

author, 1935.

24. Cirrenia Langston, “Childhood Memories of the War Between the States,”

Centreville Press, March 14, 1934, in Fern Langston, ed., Echoes of Six Mile

(privately published, 1994), p. 107; Ellison, pp. 128–29.

25. Nolen, p. 1.

26. James Pickett Jones, Yankee Blitzkrieg: Wilson's Raid Through Alabama and

Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 3.

27. Gov. T. H. Watts to Lt. Gen. Polk, April 2, 1864, The War of Rebellion: A

Compilation of the O cial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), pp. 734–35.

28. The War of Rebellion, pp. 404–16.

29. Frank E. Vandiver, “Josiah Gorgas and the Brier eld Iron Works,” Alabama

Review, January 1950, citing Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in

Alabama (New York, 1905), p. 254.

30. Ellison, p. 144.

31. Mary Ann (Cobb) Johnson McNeill, copy of unpublished typescript, in

possession of author, n.d.

32. Ellison, p. 144.

33. Ibid., p. 147.

34. Royce, p. 72.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 75.

37. Deed of Elisha and Nancy Cottingham to John P. Cottingham, James M.

Cottingham, Moses L. Cottingham, and Harry P. Cottingham, Feb. 8, 1868, BCC.

38. Deed of Rebecca Battle to Elisha Cottingham, Feb. 22, 1868, BCC.

39. Deed of Moses Cottingham to John G. Henry, Feb. 27, 1868, BCC.

40. Deed of Moses Cottingham to P.W., Feb. 27, 1868, BCC.

41. Deed of Moses L. Cottingham to J. W. Pruit, Jan. 21, 1869, BCC.

42. Deeds of Elias Bishop to McSpaden, Aug. 28, 1869; to Jasper Thompson, Aug.

21, 1869, BCC.

43. Deed of Sarah Bishop to John C. Henry, July 6, 1870, BCC.

44. Ellison, p. 92.

45. Deed of Purchase by Elias Bishop, led December 27, 1836, BCC. Bishop

acquired nearly two hundred acres on the east side of the Cahaba River, Township

22, Section 11, Range 9.

46. 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Bibb County, Ala.

47. Langston, Echoes, pp. 107–11.

48. Ellison, p. 29.

49. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark abolitionist novel

published in 1852, the character Augustine St. Clare tells the story of a powerful

slave named Scipio who despite repeated beatings remained obstinate and

disobedient. After Scipio escapes and is shot by a search party, St. Clare nurses him

back to health and then gives him papers setting him free. Scipio, now devoted and

gentle, rips the documents in half in gratitude to his master, and soon dies, after

embracing Christianity.

50. “Manifest of Brigantine Arethusa,” arriving Port of New Orleans, Nov. 6, 1821;

Inward Slave Manifests of the Port of New Orleans, Roll 2, January– March 1821,

Entry

#360,

transcribed

by

Dee

Parmer

Woodtor,

www.afrigeneas.com/slavedata/background.html (April 1999). A twelve-year-old

slave, height four feet three inches, named Scipio is listed among slaves owned by

Townes L. Webb of Petersburg, Virginia.

51. 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Bibb County. The Cottingham slave quarters

were likely similar to those of John E. Green, on a 3,400-acre plantation near the

town of Woodstock, Alabama: “The place required numerous slaves and mules to

work it. The old slave cabins were located about a hundred feet north of the

present well on the southeast side of the house. Across the present highway was a

large mule lot, cotton gin, sorghum mill, and a few other smaller buildings.” See

Ellison, p. 85.

52. Record of Incorporation, Bibb Steam Mill Company, Nov. 26, 1850, BCC.

53. “Minutes of the Mobile Conference,” Methodist Church Records, pp. 37–38,

transcribed

at homepages.rootsweb.com/~marykozy/text_files/starfile.shtml.

Methodism was not a faith for those who enjoyed even modest worldly pastimes.

Early in Starr's years of service, pastors of his Alabama conference met to decry the

dangers and immorality of “dram drinking,” viewing races, attending “dancing

parties,” circuses, or theaters, and “the indulgence of super uous ornaments.” Starr