Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Read Free Book Online

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
    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,