Slavery by Another Name (8 page)

and swol en spring streams.

Years before emancipation, Scip had seen the rst signs of the

epochal transformation about to infuse his world. Exotic new

enterprises began to appear in the former frontier of Bibb County.

On creeks surrounding the Cot ingham farm, smal forges were built

in the 1830s, early precursors to the massive steel and iron industry

that would come to dominate Alabama by the end of the century. In

1850, at a location a few miles from the Cot-tinghams’, a massive

boiler-driven sawmil began operation, pumping from the stil

virgin forests a fantastic stream of sawn planks and timbers. More

ominously, Bibb Steam Mil Company also introduced to the county

the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so

important as the Civil War loomed.

The mil acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly

al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

barracks on its property. The Cot ingham slave cabins would have

seemed luxurious in contrast.51

The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named Wil iam S.

Philips, John W. Lopsky Archibald P. McCurdy and Virgil H.

Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of

timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmil to cut lumber

and grind corn and our. 52 In addition to the two dozen slaves,

Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from

nearby farms during its busiest periods of work.

The signi cance of those evolutions wouldn't have been lost on a

slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of

slave leasing was already a xture of southern life. Farm production

was by its nature an ine cient cycle of labor, with intense periods

of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during

the months of "laid-by" time in the summer, and then another great

burst of harvest activity in the fal and early winter, fol owed nal y

by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to

maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new

opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the

most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

Given al that had changed in Bibb County in the years leading

up to the southern rebel ion, it would have been no surprise to the

old slave that he found himself during the war in the service of the

Confederacy, making iron for cannons and rebel ships in the

ironworks at Brierfield.

Perhaps it was a comfort to Scip that joining him at Brier eld

was the pastor who had been for so long a part of life at the

Cot ingham plantation. After thirty years of itinerancy among

scat ered churches, Rev. Starr was posted in 1864 to the Bibb Iron

Works, a gesture on the part of the Methodist circuit to al ow the

old preacher to nish out his days at a congregation close to the

home he cherished on Cot ingham Loop.

Starr was the archetypal backwoods Methodist. He had

completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so

completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so

profoundly uneducated that when as a man barely twenty years old

he rst began to preach at lit le churches not far from his south

Georgia birthplace, even his friends doubted privately that he could

ever carry o a career as a professional minister. But Methodism

was a young and evangelical sect in the 1830s. The rough Alabama

countryside, and especial y the masses of stil heretical slaves who

made up much of its population, was a major target for missionary

work.

The life of a Methodist circuit rider, traveling in a grinding,

repetitive loop from one set lement chapel to another, was an

entrepreneurial task of establishing churches and converting the

unwashed. A vigorous iconoclast such as Starr could overcome

academic ignorance with a fundamentalist fervor for the Bible and a

resounding voice from the pulpit. Starr had done that, winning

postings at a string of smal Methodist congregations across Georgia

and then Alabama. 53

Through the years, he had been formal y assigned to nearly

twenty di erent congregations in the circuits orbiting the Bibb

County seat of Cen-trevil e. Along with each of those churches had

come responsibility for stil more gatherings of the faithful who

worshipped in the homes of scat ered landowners or in remote

rustic set lement chapels. That duty had delivered Starr to the home

of Elisha Cot ingham, and eventual y the preacher bought a smal

piece of Cot ingham land to which he hoped someday to retire.

The people of Riverbend, free whites and black slaves, had met

for services on Elisha's plantation for so long that in minutes of the

meetings of the Methodist circuit, the congregation was known

simply as "Cot ingham's." After nearly twenty years, its members

raised a spare one-room church in the 1840s on the adjacent land

of Elisha's brother, John Cot ingham. Built on immense timber

joists, resting on pil ars of limestone rock, it would stand against

the wind and shifting times for nearly a century and a half. The

builders dubbed it Wesley Chapel.54

Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed

Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed

his step, it was to this corner of Bibb County that he was drawn to

rest. One of the preacher's sons, Lucius E. Starr, grown and ready to

raise a family of his own, became a physician and made a name for

himself in the county seat. The Cot inghams were good to Rev. Starr

and his wife, Hannah, and after a lifetime of near constant motion it

must have been a relief to him in 1860 to buy land right beside the

family that had treated them so wel .55 The Starr home was within

walking distance of the spare country chapel and the Cot ingham

family cemetery, where Starr already hoped to be buried. They

cal ed the farmhouse the "preacher's sanctum."

By the nal months of the war, the old rebrand knew wel life's

most bit er stings. His namesake son, also a Methodist minister, died

in an epidemic of yel ow fever a few years before secession. One of

his youngest, Wilbur Fisk, another likely playmate of the slave

Henry and Elisha's grandson Oliver, became a sergeant in the

Alabama 29th Infantry before seeing his unit decimated in savage

ghting across north Georgia. He died soon after during the long

defense of Atlanta in 1864.

As an unschooled man, Starr, in his day, had a particular appeal

for the raw country folk that predominated the rut ed back roads of

the South. That translated as wel into an a nity for slaves. As a

young pastor on the circuits of Georgia, Starr was praised for his

ministrations to the souls of black folks as he gal oped among the

plantations and camp meetings of south Alabama.56 So it was

t ing that the nal church appointment of his long career, where

he would wait out the end of the war, was to the ironworks at

Brier eld where slavery was being practiced in its most raw and

brutalizing form. There, Scip and the preacher Starr toiled at their

respective tasks, until General Wilson's army descended.

A few months after the surrender of the Confederacy, the U.S.

government sold the wrecked ironworks at Brier eld to the man

who during the war had been responsible for arming the entire

southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven

southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven

Alabama wartime industrial complex. Gorgas, a Pennsylvania native

who married the daughter of a former Alabama governor, had

become a commit ed Confederate, rising to the rank of general by

war's end. After the surrender, he worked tirelessly to return the

furnaces to ful use and profitability.

But the ravaged state of Alabama that surrounded him made that

plan nearly impossible. The cost of paying market rate wages to

black men such as Scip who had worked as slaves during the war

totaled a bankrupting $200 per day. Those black laborers Gorgas

could pay and keep on hand were repeatedly harassed by

marauding bands of Ku Klux Klan members. Gorgas, like Elisha

Cot ingham and so many other whites bewildered by both the

rami cations of black emancipation and the continuing venality of

renegade whites, was disconsolate. The South they rst dreamed of

making an independent republic grounded in slavery—and then

dreamed of rebuilding as a rival to the North—appeared

irretrievably broken. "What an end to our great hopes!" he wrote in

his diary. "Is it possible that we were wrong?"57

Scip Cot inham, having learned the skil s of a foundry worker

during the war, must in his own way also have been ba ed by the

extraordinary turn of events that left him a free man in the twilight

of his life.

Neither he nor Henry would likely have known what to say to so

strange and moot a white man's question as the one posed by

Gorgas to his diary. But they would have had no doubt as to

whether Gorgas and the Cot ingham brothers, and the hundreds of

thousands of other southern men who had taken up arms during the

war, had been wrong.

Before Union troops arrived in Bibb County, the night hours had

permit ed Henry his one limited taste of freedom within the

con nes of chat el life. It was after sundown that the slaves of

Riverbend and other farms could slip quietly through the forests to

see and court one another.

Now freedom had turned darkness into light. Henry young and

Now freedom had turned darkness into light. Henry young and

strong at the very moment of the rebirth of his people, no longer

had to wait for the passage of the sun into the horizon. His feet

could carry him ying down the dusty track to the Bishop place, in

plain daylight for al to see, past old Elisha's cabins, past the store

at Six Mile, past the broken iron furnace at Brierfield, to Mary.

For Henry and Mary, freedom was a tangible thing, and January

was a ne time for a wedding. Both raised on the banks of the

Cahaba, they were as at uned to the seasonal swel s of the river and

the deep soil on its edges as the great stretches of spidery white

lilies that crowded its shoals each spring and retreated into its

depths every winter.

Picking last fal 's crop of cot on in the val ey had gone on until

nearly Christmas. In another two months, it would be time to begin

knocking down the brit le cot on stalks left from last year,

harnessing the mules and plows, and breaking the crusted soil for a

new crop. Planting season came hard on the heels of that, and

before long it would be summer, when mule hooves and plow

blades and bare black feet, slavery or no slavery, would march

between the furrows, without rest, for nearly every hour of every

day. So that January, bit er as was its wind, arrived for them sweet

and restful.

Like Henry and Mary al of Alabama, and the South—indeed at

one level al of the United States—was set ing up housekeeping in

the winter of 1868. Rede ned by war, grief, deprivation, death, and

emancipation, America was faced with the chal enge of repairing

and reordering a col ective household.

Some of the old slaves said they too weren't sure what "freedom"

real y was. Henry likely couldn't explain it either, but he had to

know. This wedding day was emancipation. It was the license from

the courthouse and big leather-bound book that listed his marriage

right beside those of the children of the old master. It was his name

on the piece of paper, "Henry Cot-tinham." No more was he one of

the "Cot ingham niggers."

To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er

To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er

time to marry They marched the few steps to the house of Rev.

Starr, down to the Cot ingham chapel around the curve, and took

their vows as free citizens.58 Henry Cot inham was a man, with a

name, spel ed just the way he had always said it. Freedom was an

open eld, a strong wife, and time to make his mark. Mary's

"increase," like the product of al their labor, would be theirs—not

Elisha Cot ingham's. Henry would plant his seed, in soil he knew

and in Mary his wife. In a few years, they would have a son named