what happened to the slaves after they were freed

Douglas A. Blackmon is Atlanta bureau master for The Wall Street Journal and writer of Slavery by Another Name. hibernate caption

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Note: Writer's footnotes have been omitted.

Introduction

The Bricks We Stand up On

On March 30, 1908, Dark-green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true offense. Vagrancy, the law-breaking of a person not beingness able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the country legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, about tellingly in a time of massive unemployment amid all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for blackness men. Cottenham'southward crime was blackness.

Later three days backside bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift advent before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-solar day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an bordering canton, was sold. Nether a continuing organization between the canton and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the Due north—U.Southward. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young homo over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees. What the visitor's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs beyond Alabama, was entirely up to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Gradient No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden banter at nighttime and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must take exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.

Waves of affliction ripped through the population. In the month earlier Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first 4 weeks, vi died. Before the year was over, nigh 60 men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.

Most of the broken bodies, forth with hundreds of others earlier and afterward, were dumped into shallow graves scattered amongst the refuse of the mine.

Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.

Steel's production of iron. Twoscore-five years after President Abraham Lincoln'due south Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled nether the lash at Slope 12.

Imprisoned in what was and so the virtually advanced metropolis of the South, guarded past whipping bosses employed by the nigh iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the aureate Due north, they were slaves in all merely proper name.

Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside v miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the simply tangible relics of what Light-green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the expressionless from nearby prison mines once operated by U.South. Steel. Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the identify. No paths led to it.

I was a reporter for The Wall Street Periodical, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then beingness trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World State of war Ii and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that twenty-four hour period in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple fe fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.

Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the centre of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat most what had been the intersection of two track lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and fe—all endemic and operated by U.S. Steel at the peak of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to piece of work in Alabama mines prior to the Bully Depression. His gramps, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family unit abode place south of Birmingham.

A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific tape of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery'south inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Afterward I would discover atop a nearby rise some other burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.

The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Most all were black men arrested and and then "leased" by state and canton governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had caused. Here and in scores of other similarly rough graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly dissimilar from that of the antebellum Southward in that for most men, and the relatively few women fatigued in, this slavery did not concluding a lifetime and did non automatically extend from i generation to the next. Simply it was notwithstanding slavery—a organisation in which armies of gratuitous men, guilty of no crimes and entitled past law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to practice the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary concrete coercion.

The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of east-mails, letters, and telephone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to exist an account of one more important only sadly predictable bullet bespeak in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the solar day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at ane point said to me: "I guess it'southward really no surprise." The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some fashion—partly considering of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation's most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an reply or part of one to a question and so unnerving few dared inquire it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored accelerate of African Americans in U.S. gild in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying notwithstanding visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How had so big a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might exist no answer, that African Americans possibly were simply damned past fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a grade of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced past the U.South. economic organisation and abided at all levels of authorities, offered a concrete reply to that fear for the beginning time.

As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent corruption of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an bated in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the Due south. The brutality of the punishments received past African Americans was unjust, just not shocking in light of the waves of petty criminal offence ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. Co-ordinate to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of liberty and had been conditioned by generations of chains to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era merely was not central to information technology. Sympathy for the victims, withal brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn't be determined. Official accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts nether which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the adjacent in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived past the most dubious sources—southern whites who engineered and most straight profited from the arrangement. It overlooked many of the most meaning dimensions of the new forced labor, including the axis of its part in the spider web of restrictions put in place to suppress blackness citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most breezy—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate blackness men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines as well leased fifty-fifty larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire withal more than black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And considering well-nigh scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the commonage outcome of the decisions by hundreds of state and local canton governments during at least a role of this flow to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled past a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accustomed equally a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented every bit having transpired as a result of large—seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What's more than, African Americans were portrayed by near historians as an almost static component of U.S. club. Their leaders inverse with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the aforementioned people yet non gratuitous l years afterwards. There was no acknowledgment of the furnishings of bicycle upon wheel of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing i generation rise higher up the cusp of poverty just to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources.

Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old canton jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and commitment of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thou pages related to debt slavery cases sit down in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of more often than not obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, nearly ever under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The full number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than than a hundred thousand and possibly more than than twice that figure. Instead of testify showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by country and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of blackness aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in which public leaders faced a true selection between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest ceremonious equality, and emphatically chose the old. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the S's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to brand 1 of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 as well marked the final total disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed downward by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Northward Carolina, and Due south Carolina—where more 75 percentage of the black population in the United States and then lived.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War. The aforementioned men who congenital railroads with thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories and mines in the 1850s were also the first to use forced African American labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing slaves from i farm or factory to the adjacent, bartering for the toll of slaves, and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The barbarous forms of concrete punishment employed confronting "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against "slaves" in 1840. The anger and agony of southern whites that immune such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial meaty that suffocated the aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks every bit they approached the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Dark-green Cottenham must begin much earlier than even the Ceremonious War, and would extend far across the finish of his life.

Near ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the confront of the rising southern white assail on black independence—even as black leaders increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for assistance poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the part of blacks in U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would take to accept the terminate of freedom.

On July 31, 1903, a alphabetic character to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White Firm from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her 14-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a twelvemonth earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would accept no interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. "They wont permit me take him. . . . He hase not don nil for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case 12007. No further action was ever recorded. Her letter of the alphabet lies today in the National Archives.

A globe in which the seizure and sale of a black man—fifty-fifty a black child—was viewed every bit neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.

Millions of blacks lived in that shadow—every bit forced laborers or their family unit members, or African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of Earth War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of blackness Americans for the start fourth dimension since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War.

That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a nascency in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is near entirely absent-minded from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, insufficiently wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the master destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. At that place is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burying field. The entombed in that location are utterly mute, the fact of their existence equally fragile every bit a scent in wind.

That silence was an disturbing frustration in the writing of this book— especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most interconnected to those events. Simply as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story gradually appeared. I constitute the facts of a narrative of a group of common slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum S; of the family he produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that steeped the place and era of Green Cottenham's birth; of the obliterating forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could the business relationship of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a unmarried, anonymous human who by every modern measure was inconsequential and unvoiced? Somewhen I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's nearly authentic and compelling dimension.

Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the boundaries of the burial field, considering even without do good of his words the stifled horror he and thousands of others must have felt every bit they descended through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that Cottenham belonged every bit the key figure of this narrative. The slavery that survived long by emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of boggling characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is truthful. Each graphic symbol was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time. I endeavor to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his vocalism rests at the centre of this book.

Excerpted from Slavery past Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Copyright © 2008 by Douglas A. Blackmon. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a sectionalisation of Random Firm, Inc. All rights reserved. No role of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115

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