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

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