Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition
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- Length: 498 pages
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This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age of Neoslavery.”
By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented Pulitzer Prize-winning account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
Following the Emancipation Proclamation, convicts—mostly black men—were “leased” through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
“An astonishing book. . . . It will challenge and change your understanding of what we were as Americans—and of what we are.” —Chicago Tribune
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From the Trade Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
Freedom wasn’t yet three years old when the wedding day came. Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop had been chattel slaves until the momentous final days of the Civil War, as nameless in the eyes of the law as cows in the field. All their lives, they could no more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a final furious sweep of Union soldiers–in a bewildering blur of liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war–ravaged the Cahaba River valley.
Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr, the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.
To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry. In every direction from the Cottingham Loop, the simple dirt road alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bitter. The valley, the undulating hills of Bibb County, even the bridges and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down from the last foothills of the Appalachians and into the flat fertile plains to the south, were still wrecked from the savage cavalry raids of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April 1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in billowing swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scattered before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the valley remained a twisted ruin. Fallow fields. Burned barns. Machinery rusting at the bottoms of wells. Horses and mules dead or lost. The people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.
From the front porch of Elisha Cottingham’s house, two stories stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the river’s edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren vista. The land had long ago lost nearly all resemblance to the massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fifty years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of its carefully tended bounty of the last years before the war.
He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded from the house in one long sheet of soil, falling gradually away from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly five hundred yards, the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when Elisha first arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and south, the great field was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up over turtle-shell shapes of limestone protruding from the banks, growing deeper and wider, falling faster and more furiously–strong enough to spin a small grist mill–before it turned to the west and suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cottingham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.
Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cottingham, like countless other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical
spectrum of possibilities for what might yet follow, Elisha had to consider the terrifying–and ultimately realized–possibility that all human effort invested at the confluence of Cottingham Creek and the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last Cottingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the fields hacked from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached gravestones clustered atop the hill still bore the Cottingham name.
Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself, in an Alabama territory that was still untamed. It was 1817, and Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.
Elisha’s brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded county seat of Centreville, where in short order shallow-draft riverboats would land and a trading center would be established. (2) Another brother, William, moved farther south. But Elisha and his younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and planted season upon season of cotton. The engines of their enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported them to Alabama and later bred more themselves–including Henry–from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising “Negroes for Sale.” Manning farms strung along a looping wagon road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins, and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black labor to the rich black land, the Cottingham brothers became prosperous and comfortable.
Some neighbors called the Cottingham section of the county Pratt’s Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the Cottinghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had felled the first timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water, imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the Cottinghams, this place was Riverbend.
The Cottinghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especially in contrast to the industrial slavery that would eventually bud nearby, life on the Cottingham plantation reflected the biblical understanding that cruelty to any creature was a sin–that black slaves, even if not quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.
Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings, Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins built of roughhewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock fireplaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two young boys and a seven-year-old girl. (3)
Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha’s grandson Oliver, raised there on the Cottingham farm, would have been a lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named Henry. (4) When Elisha Cottingham’s daughter Rebecca married a neighbor, Benjamin Battle, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and servant. “In consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my daughter,” Elisha wrote, I give her “a certain negro girl named Frances, about 14 years old.” (5)
Those slaves who died on the Cottingham place were buried with neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870–clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who ministered to all of the souls on the Cottingham place. The Starr family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant dead, was set down the hill and toward the road, even more vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.
Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cottingham master–giving permission to marry to a favored mulatto named Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha’s side past emancipation and until the old master’s death, would become the namesake of Henry and Mary’s youngest son.
But even as Elisha had allowed a strain of tenderness to co-reside with the brutally circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost sight of their fundamental definition–as cattle. They were creatures bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify, his newlywed daughter received all “future increase of the girl.” (6)
The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one year his junior, in 18... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Dennis Boutsikaris (born December 21, 1952) is an American two-time Obie-Award winning character actor. He is a Broadway Actor and frequent television guest star and leading man in made-for-TV movies. He is also an Audie Award winning narrator of audiobooks.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Product details
- ASIN : B001NLKT24
- Publisher : Anchor; Reprint edition (December 27, 2008)
- Publication date : December 27, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 4063 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 498 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #83,372 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Historical Essays (Kindle Store)
- #26 in Historical Essays (Books)
- #48 in African American Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

A native of Leland, Mississippi, Doug Blackmon is chair of the Miller Center Forum at the University of Virginia and a contributing correspondent to the Washington Post.
For many years, he was the Wall Street Journal's Atlanta Bureau Chief and then senior national correspondent. "Slavery by Another Name" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, among many other honors. Blackmon and a team of WSJ reporters and editors were finalists for another Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for their investigation into the causes of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that year.
He lives in Atlanta.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2018
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I have this book four stars, because of comments made about the Holocaust. The rich Jew trope reflects classic Anti-Judaism rhetoric. A very small number of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were wealthy. Most had lived in abject poverty for centuries. The author really needs to study the history of Jews to see even more shades of slavery.
Slavery was not abolished. It was simply (and predictably) replaced by an even more devastating system of legal, codified oppression that made the incarceration of "free" black men, a desirable and profitable practice, and a central component of economic prosperity for white businesses. "Laws" were created specifically to fine and arrest black men so their "debt" could be sold to white businesses who would in turn use the men as forced laborers. The demand for this cheap labor was insatiable. Black men were arrested for "talking too loud" in front of a white woman, or being "disrespectful". Many were arrested without even being charged - that's how blatant the practice was. Vagrancy laws were also created and used for the sole purpose of "rounding up" as many black men as possible to feed this new system of slavery. Many of these men died working in unspeakably brutal conditions in mines, foundries, plantations, and railroads. This system was a brutal manifestation of how whites viewed blacks, a view that, like it or not, is still at the core of American consciousness.
This book is a painful, depressing, but necessary read. It should be required reading in high school and college.
As an elementary school teacher (35 years with a master’s degree) and coming from a family of educators (father, mother, uncle, sister, and both brothers) I always knew history was skewed, less then accurate, and incomplete, favoring the “White” man, the religious proselytizers, or the victor of battles! It is just the way it is.
So, this book, although difficult to read and redundant at times, is eye opening and important in this time of social injustice (BLM) and strife! As I mentioned above history is skewed and terribly incomplete and this book is a start at recognizing the past and teaching our children about the truth and how look at historical written works.
Open your eyes.... read this and other books like this because there is always two sides to history!
This book brings to light in painstaking detail how the South got around the abolition of slavery. The end of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the subsequent removal of Union Troops from the South in 1877 signaled the beginning of the Post-Reconstruction South. This change would lead to events that would have negative consequences with respect to the now free black population. This would later be exacerbated by the terrible ruling in the landmark 1896 United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. With its separate but equal doctrine, it reaffirmed the Jim Crow segregation laws that had been passed by the Post-Reconstruction south.
The problems in the South were manifold. The biggest question was who were going to work on the plantations? Who were going to work the jobs that whites shunned? The South muddled along until Post-Reconstruction, and then the idea of convict leasing came into play with the collusion of law enforcement, the judiciary, and local and state officials.
What the 13th Amendment, enacted in 1865, had expressly forbidden was brought in through the back door, once the front door was barred. The only difference was that it was now called convict leasing, a practice that would continue in the South in til well into the 20th century and the passage of the Civil Right Law of 1964.
This book details how black people lived during this time, how convict leasing worked, the roundups of the black population when labor was needed, and the corruption of the penal system. Thus, a dual system of justice was born in the South: one for blacks and one for whites, and never the twain would meet. This book explains who was impacted by it, the human tragedy of it, how and why it was allowed to proliferate, who profited, and what measures were taken to curtail it, only to see those efforts stonewalled and thwarted.
This reprehensible practice was yet another blight on these United States. The human tragedy of it all was staggering. Yet, the thinking that was in play then, still has cultural remnants of it in our criminal justice system today. It also severely hampered the economic and social progress of the black population in many respects.
This really is an eye-opening look at our history, one that has been found wanting in many respects. This exhaustive work on these complex issues is a superlative expose’ of a little known segment of American history, one that has now been brought forth into the light and examined by this very thoughtful author. It is a part of history with which more people should be conversant, if only to get a better understanding of these United States.
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