Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

In January 1968, only three years after emancipation was ratified, former slaves Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop married in an Alabama valley near the Cahaba River, which had been ravaged during a Union Army attack.

Blackmon backtracks the narrative to the arrival of a white man, Elisha Cottingham, in Alabama in the 1800s. Elisha and his brother, John, established a plantation, adding more slaves—including Henry—as the years went on. According to Blackmon, though the Cottinghams felt some minor affection for their slaves, the enslaver-enslaved relationship was an inherently exploitative, unequal, and transactional connection between an owner and his or her human property.

Blackmon delves into the industrial efforts to produce iron for the Confederate army during the Civil War—efforts supported by enslavers who sent their slaves to work in Alabama industrial mines. Though the iron works companies preferred to temporarily lease slaves from their owners rather than purchase the men, they often hired agents to scour the South for slaves who could work for them.

The Civil War put enslaved people in a conflicted position; while they were victims of the South’s plantation system and subjects of the Union Army’s liberation, they were also charged with protecting their enslavers’ belongings from Union forces. In the spring of 1865, the Union Army destroyed many of Alabama’s industrial war operations and freed the slaves manning them. Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was captured, and the Civil War ended with Alabama suffering a loss of $500 million.

The Cottinghams were financially devastated by the war’s end and the upheaval of social order, including the potential for freed Black Americans to gain political and economic power. Following the war, the Freedman’s Bureau could grant up to 40 acres of land to formerly enslaved people, but President Andrew Johnson—who took office after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—retracted the offer. Still, rumors grew during the first year or so of the Reconstruction Era—the decade following the Civil War—that Black people would be granted land titles, leading to fear and resentment from white Southern landowners. Returning Confederate soldiers and deserters committed rampant violence, contributing to a culture of lawlessness throughout the South.

Blackmon recounts the Cottinghams’ financial losses in the wake of the Civil War, noting that most of their wealth had come from the value of their slaves. Once these people were freed, the Cottinghams had only their land, the post-war value of which was near impossible to determine without the certainty of labor. Blackmon then tells the story of Elisha’s son, Moses, who had moved to Louisiana before the war. Moses enlisted with the Confederate army, and while he was away, his wife died in childbirth. He briefly returned to bury her and send his six children to Alabama. They were escorted on their perilous journey by a preacher and one of Moses’s slaves. This symbolized a “reliance on Black Americans that Southern whites could never again allow” (30) after slaves were emancipated. To reassert their power, white people forcibly compelled freed Black Americans to rebuild the South in conditions akin to slavery.

The narrative then introduces Scipio (or Scip), the oldest enslaved African of the Cottingham plantation. Late in life, he married a woman named Charity. They had many children and remained together after emancipation. A nearby ironworks in Bibb County leased slaves, including Scip, from farms like the Cottinghams’ and was known for its brutal treatment. A white preacher named Reverend Starr, who preached to both free white people and enslaved Black people also worked there. (Rev. Starr ends up officiating Henry and Mary’s wedding—the couple from the chapter’s beginning.)

After the war, the US government sold the ironworks company to Josiah Gorgas, a white man who was responsible for providing firearms to the Confederacy. Gorgas dreamt of rebuilding the South, but that dream seemed broken in the wake of the war.

The chapter’s main theme is the question of what the South would do with the freed slaves after the war. The South was financially ruined without slaves to work their farms, and many newly freed Black men wandered from town to town, unable to find employment. Before the war, white Southerners had differing views on slavery; after the war, they were largely united in their resentment toward free Black Americans.

Blackmon explores some of the nuances of Black people’s role in colonial America. For example, in the mid to late 1600s, colonial legislatures begin to codify the supremacy of the white man into law, excluding Black and Indigenous people from the rights that white people held and legally making them less than fully human. Given this history, in the post-Civil War era, many white people in the South found it hard to acknowledge Black individuals’ humanity or offer them equal rights. As Blackmon writes:

The resistance to […] full emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between Black Americans and whites—was so virulent and effective that […] the role of the African American in American society would not be clear for another hundred years (42).

But in Bibb County, Alabama, there were no moral debates about slavery. Men like Scipio were increasingly sold into industrial work, forging iron and building battle ships without pay. While plantation owners might have adopted a paternalistic stance and had some familiarity with their slaves, in industrial settings, slaves were treated impersonally. Similar conditions persisted on large-scale cotton plantations, where slaves regularly died due to the work conditions. Jonathan Newton Smith’s discovery of coal in Alabama in the 1800s—and the industrial production stemming from that natural resource—also contributed to the grueling working conditions for slaves who worked in the coal mines.

Southern railroad companies also purchased thousands of slaves. Jonathan Ware and his son, Horace, operated Shelby Works, a large ironworks company, in nearby Shelby County using more than 300 skilled enslaved workers. Shelby Works produced immense quantities of iron for the Confederate government; Colonel Josiah Gorgas controlled this wartime operation. In Brierfield, not far from the Cottinghams’ farm, Jonathan Smith opened his own ironworks company. But the dominant ironworks company in the South was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which became the largest commercial business in the South and a subsidiary of US Steel. This same company later bought Scip’s grandson, Green Cottenham, decades after the end of slavery.

Skilled enslaved labor became highly valuable during the war. Most of these enslaved workers were young and middle-aged men though some women and children performed domestic labor. The leased slaves were managed by a white overseer or captain in the ironworks, but the slaves’ owners were the only ones allowed to dole out severe punishments.

John T. Milner, an Alabama engineer, convinced the Confederate government to open an iron blast furnace. Milner believed that white people “would always look upon and treat the negro as an inferior being” (51), and it was like-minded men who brought about a new form of slavery after the war through forced leasing of convicts. Men like Milner believed that African Americans managed by white men could be highly productive laborers. Blackmon notes that forcing convicts to work was legal under the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery.

By 1865, most Southern states passed anti-vagrancy laws, largely to criminalize Black people and force them into labor. Some states decreed that African Americans needed discharge papers from a former employer to legally work—a law that intentionally prevented them from leaving the plantation. Blackmon provides an overview of laws that forced convicts into hard labor in Arkansas, Mississippi—where convicts were transferred to a former Confederate general who founded the Ku Klux Klan—Florida, Tennessee, and, of course, Alabama, where the revenue from leasing Black convicts was used to pay off fees to judges, sheriffs, and other officials. By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every former Confederate state except for Virginia adopted this forced labor practice. While these Black men were supposed to be treated fairly and provided adequate food, they were punished with whippings and other forms of torture. Men who attempted to escape were shot; in the fourth year after Alabama began leasing its prisoners, 45% were killed.

Blackmon uses “increase”—a term describing how Black men and women were forced to produce enslaved offspring—to refer to Henry and Mary Cottinham’s growing family. Mary gave birth to a little girl, Cooney, after the end of the Civil War. When Cooney was still an infant, the Northern states ratified the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing African American men legal voting rights and granting Black men and women the right of equal protection under the law as US citizens. Soon, the Southern states passed legislation entitling Black children to a basic education. When Cooney was two years old, Elisha Cottingham died. The enslaved men and women who worked on his plantation had taken different paths after the war ended. Some left Bibb County. Others stayed close to Elisha, even remaining in their old quarters for some time. Another group, which included Scip, simply moved a few miles away. Scip took the last name Cottinham and continued to work at the Bibb coal furnace.

Before the Civil War, enslaved people were taught that their white enslaver ruled over them as part of a hierarchy sanctioned by God. After emancipation, the role of the enslaver/overseer was occupied by local law enforcement. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other law enforcement officials in the South were sanctioned by the state and had similar control over Black people’s lives. These officials received no regular salary but were compensated instead through fines issued to people charged with a crime or fees for providing services, such as serving a warrant.

Sheriffs had the most power when enforcing debts that needed to be paid, but justices of the peace, as Blackmon describes, were the “most visible presence of government authority in the crude world of country life, empowered to perform marriages, formalize contracts between parties, and otherwise represent law and order” (63). Amos M. Elliott, who owned a store in Shelby County, was the local justice of peace. In court cases involving debt, the local justice of peace received a percentage of the settlement as a fee or payment. In many cases, Elliott paid defendants’ fees himself but required them to sign a mortgage to repay the fee with interest. This allowed Elliott to profit from the cases he oversaw. On occasions when defendants could not pay, the sheriff seized their property as payment. This led to the institution of leasing convicts to the ironworks companies; by the early 1880s, 29 of Alabama’s 67 counties were leasing their prisoners.

Convict leasing was financially desirable for the companies and participating law enforcement. Witnesses and other public officials could also collect part of the lease payment, and they would receive pieces of paper—known as “scrips”—that could be redeemed for money after a prisoner paid off his debts. Sometimes, if scrips holders could not wait to redeem these vouchers, they would sell them to speculators for a lower amount.

Sheriffs developed special relationships with companies, arresting more people to fill labor shortages. There was little legal accountability, as trials for Black men, who could usually not afford a defense attorney, were discouraged. The process could take as little as three days, and convicted men were often sentenced to nine months’ hard labor.

The convict leasing system affected debt collection in other situations as well. For example, if Black sharecroppers working on a white man’s land received a loan from a white farmer, the white farmer could—and often did—accuse the Black worker of fraud. Because Black men knew they would not get a fair trial, they were forced into a type of plea bargain. They had to confess their guilt before being tried—an outdated legal practice—and rather than convict them, the judge would accept a payment from the white farmer, called a surety. In exchange, the Black farmers signed a contract to work without pay for the white farmer until the surety debt was paid off—a form of indentured servitude.

Blackmon concludes that the convict labor system served two purposes for white Southerners: terrorizing the Black population into submission and funding state governments through payments received by individuals and corporations for forced labor.

Historians held a common assumption that lawlessness was frequent among Black Americans in the post-Civil War era, thus leading to violence and repressive laws. Through data collection, Blackmon shows that most African Americans were arrested for trivial or fake charges, not real crimes. He describes how Elisha Cottingham’s white grandson was convicted of assault and battery with a weapon but was released with only a $1 fine while Black men convicted of fabricated crimes were forced into the labor system for months.

John Milner was one of the early adopters of the forced convict labor system; he used enslaved workers in his coal company by the end of the 1870s. He also sold part of his Coalburg mine—and its forced laborers—to James W. English, an Atlanta politician and one of the largest buyers of enslaved labor in Georgia. Slaves also worked at Shelby County’s Eureka Mines, where J. W. Comer—a descendant of a prestigious slave-owning family—managed the forced labor system. When miners went on strike at the Pratt Mines, outside Birmingham, Comer was assigned to come break it up by putting enslaved laborers in the mine. The strike ended, and the state of Alabama made a hefty profit, confirming for both state and company officials that convict (i.e., slave) labor was necessary for doing business.

Alabama’s prison inspector, Reginald Dawson, investigated whether prisoners were being treated humanely as part of a state commission. He described the conditions in Milner’s mines as “miserable […] unfit for men to be kept in” (75). Conditions were equally bad in Comer’s mines. A prisoner named Ezekiel Archey testified in a state investigation about the abuses perpetrated by Comer, including whippings and water torture. Milner’s mine was also investigated; The New York Times described the mine’s dirty, dangerous conditions in a report and noted that prisoners were shackled in chains.

Dawson strongly believed that convict labor should not be used in the mines. Politicians passed a law requiring companies to provide convict laborers with clean living conditions, sufficient food, and safety from excessive punishment, but the labor camps ignored these rules. When Dawson asked Milner to remove the shackles from his convicts, Milner said no because he believed his best workers would run away.

Shelby County passed a law requiring an outside land agent to oversee the convict labor system. Amos Elliott was appointed. Elliott could hire out prisoners to any person or corporation, but he was supposed to look after the treatment of the convicts. However, there is no indication that Elliott ever inquired about the prisoners’ treatment. More than 200 prisoners went through the convict leasing system in Shelby County between 1884 and 1886, but few records of the charges against them—or the fines they owed—exist.

Blackmon pivots to nearby Bibb County, where Jonathon S. Gardner was the judge and ultimate authority of administrative power in this area. With Gardner in office, Bibb County started leasing convicts. One of the cases Gardner presided over concerned Milton Cottingham—one of Elisha Cottingham’s former slaves who worked as a sharecropper. Milton was charged with malicious mischief—harm done to cows owned by another individual. Gardner found him guilty and fined him $24. Fortunately, Milton’s brothers paid his fine, and he was set free.

The chapter opens with the death of Cooney—Henry and Mary Cottinham’s little girl from the previous chapter—and reveals that only six of Mary’s nine children survived past childhood. Their last child was Green.

Blackmon describes two forces that affected the Black Cottenham family and other African Americans in the South: first, white people’s effort to end Black independence and political participation in the South; and second, widespread government programs put in place to assist with social and economic progress for white people only. African Americans in the South were largely impoverished at the end of the Civil War; more than half of them could not read. But millions of white Southerners were poor and illiterate as well.

The editor of the Atlanta Constitution declared a new term in 1886: “‘the New South’—one in which industrialism would replace agriculture and in which the conflicts of region and race that had paralyzed the nation for more than twenty-five years were at an end” (88). This belief in the New South reflected the economic growth generated by the installment of industrial centers in places like Birmingham. By 1881, the city was producing 400,000 tons of coal, and Wall Street investors began backing new businessmen emerging in the South’s coal industry. One of these businessmen was James W. Sloss, one of the first to lease enslaved labor from Alabama’s prisons. Sloss and a few others took over an underground area that would become Pratt Mines, which is where Green Cottenham was enslaved and died. Sloss sold his company to investors, and the new owners called it Sloss-Sheffield Iron and Steel Company. The company also bought John Milner’s mining operation at Coalburg. This new industrial system replaced the old crude mines like Brierfield, where Scip worked and died in the 1880s.

Many poor Black Americans moved to Birmingham to seek out new opportunities. But they rarely had access to the same jobs as white people. Most companies still believed African Americans’ greatest value was as forced labor to prevent free white workers from demanding better pay. Blackmon estimates that at least 10,000 Black men worked as leased convicts in the 1880s in the South. The railroads in Georgia also use forced convict labor. Joel Hurt—a wealthy real estate developer who leased convicts for his coal and iron company—developed a new residential neighborhood in Atlanta. The bricks in this new neighborhood came from former Atlanta mayor James W. English, who used leased convict labor in his brick factory.

To describe the systemic injustice Black Americans faced, Blackmon quotes Frederick Douglass, a prominent Black leader of the pre-Civil War era:

[I]n all relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight […] denies us accommodation […] excludes our children from schools […] compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring us the least reward (93).

Blackmon notes a Supreme Court ruling on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which would have profound implications for court cases later. The ruling stated that the Act, which forced Americans to abide by the 14th and 15th Amendments, could only be enforced in a limited number of circumstances. This made civil rights a local concern rather than a federal one, and the federal government developed a policy that left tackling slavery to Southern state courts. As such, a new form of slavery was allowed to flourish unchecked in the South, as states passed laws that scaled back the rights of African Americans. During the Reconstruction period, when Black political participation was at a peak and African Americans enjoyed rights like voting, white people could not be as openly racist in their policies. But the Supreme Court ruling unleashed a wave of racist legislation intended to hamper Black civic life.

In Alabama, Tennessee, Coal, Iron & Railroad signed a contract with the state to lease convicts for the Pratt Mines. Due to the nature of the contract, the company essentially owned all convicts in the state for the next 25 years. Blackmon briefly describes the coal-making process: Men removed coal using picks and jackhammers. The coal was transported out of the mine by a steam-powered cart and sent by train to several ovens, where it turned into coke and was used as fuel to make steel and iron.

There were different classes of prisoners working in the mines. “First-class” ones loaded four tons of coal a day; the weakest prisoners—known as “dead hands”—were required to load one ton of coal a day. Depending on the class of prisoner, the company paid the state anywhere from $9 to $18.50 per convict.

Blackmon describes the disgusting living conditions prisoners faced in the mines. They received little medical attention, ate unsanitary food, and were beaten often by cruel guards. Hundreds died from mine explosions and disease, their bodies buried hastily or burned in the ovens. Child laborers also worked in the mines. However, company officials lied, stating that convicts were fed well and housed properly. Blackmon notes that most of the men imprisoned in these camps and mines committed no actual offense or trivial offenses. Some were arrested for same-sex intercourse or miscegenation—having sex with a white woman. Others were convicted for “illegal voting” to intimidate African Americans into not voting.

One of the more common charges was, as previously mentioned, vagrancy. Because sheriffs received compensation from fees charged to the convict, they had a motive to arrest more Black men than ever, even if they did nothing wrong. Sometimes companies would write to county sheriffs and ask them to seize specific Black men. And because of racist stereotypes about Black criminality, it did not even occur to sympathetic white people—like investigator Reginald Dawson—that the Black men may not have committed the crimes. All these atrocities occurred while Black individuals still exercised the right to vote in the South, though that right would not last much longer.

Backlash to African Americans’ civil rights continued, starting with equal public education funding. White Southerners believed educating Black Americans would harm the South’s agricultural economy by taking away workers. In the end, Alabamans successfully drove away funding from Black schools by passing a law stating that local officials could distribute the school taxes among Black and white schools in any way they deemed fair. This led to white schools receiving most of the funding. Even activists and somewhat progressive white Northerners seemed to abandon Black Southerners—some on the basis that they believed African Americans were genetically inferior.

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that Homer Plessy—a white man with some African ancestry—did not have the right to ride in a white-only train compartment. The ruling upheld the existence of separate-but-equal facilities for Black and white Americans. It also suggested that so long as white Southerners gave a “charade of equal treatment for African Americans” (111), they were morally and legally cleared of any wrongdoing in the court system. Blackmon argues that this was a new turning point for open lies in US politics, which stood in contrast to the honesty that white Northerners claimed to offer when they went to war. White Northerners’ acceptance of a nonexistent or false notion of Black citizenship was effectively an abandonment of the principles they sought to protect.

Due to the Supreme Court ruling, the men running the leased convict-operated mines and camps created laws for arresting and re-enslaving Black people. Some, like Scipio’s descendant Abraham, continued to vote despite laws that tried to bar them from the polls. Ultimately, a 1902 Alabama law prevented all Black Americans in the state from voting, and it took another 60 years before a Black Cottenham could vote again. Henry Cottinham died in the 1890s, and Mary left Brierfield—the place where Black Cottenham had once gathered after emancipation—for Montevallo, a town in Shelby County. Her children grew and left the house, until only her youngest child, Green, remained.