Slavery by Another Name Read Online Free PDF Page A

huge mathematical majorities in Louisiana,
    Mississippi, southern Alabama, south Georgia, and South Carolina,
    would soon vote and rule governments and perhaps take their
    masters’ lands. This vision was a horror almost beyond
    contemplation. It poisoned the air for Elisha and other white
    landowners with prospects for even greater disaster.
    In the last days of ghting, the U.S. Congress had created the
    Freed-men's Bureau to aid the South's emancipated slaves.8 New
    laws gave the agency the power to divide land con scated by the
    federal government and to have "not more than forty acres of such
    land …assigned" to freedmen and black war refugees for a period of
    three years. Afterward, the law said former slaves would be al owed
    to purchase the property to hold forever. President Andrew
    Johnson rescinded the provision a few months later, but
    emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that
    emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that
    northern soldiers stil garrisoned across the region would eventual y
    parcel out to them al or part of the land on which they had long
    toiled.
    The threat that Elisha's former slaves would come to own his
    plantation—that he and his family would be landless, stripped of
    possessions and outnumbered by the very creatures he had bred and
    raised—was palpable.
    The last desperate ral ying cal s of the Confederacy had been
    exhortations that a Union victory meant the political and economic
    subjugation of whites to their black slaves. In one of the final acts of
    the Confederate Congress, rebel legislators asserted that defeat
    would result in "the con scation of the estates, which would be
    given to their former bondsmen."9
    Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by
    Gen. Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman to 400,000 acres of rich
    plantation land in South Carolina early in 1865. It was unclear
    whether blacks would be able to retain any of the property, but
    rumor ared anew among blacks across the South the next year at
    Christmastime—the end of the annual crop season—that plantation
    land everywhere would soon be distributed among them. The U.S.
    Congress debated such a plan openly in 1867, as it drew up the
    statutes to govern Reconstruction in the southern states. And again
    as harvest time ended that year, word whipped through the
    countryside that blacks would soon have land. At one point the
    fol owing year, in 1868, during a period of intense speculation
    among freed slaves that land was soon to be provided to them,
    many blacks purchased boundary markers to be prepared for the
    marking of of their forty-acre tracts.10
    Forty miles to the west of the Cot ingham farm, in Greene
    County, hundreds of former slaves led suit against white
    landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be
    compel ed to pay wages earned during the prior season's work.
    Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it al
    1,800 lawsuits filed by the freedmen.11
    Despite Bibb County's remote location, far from any of the most
    famous military campaigns, the Civil War had not been a distant
    event. In the early months of ghting, Alabama industrialists
    realized that the market for iron su cient for armaments would
    become lucrative in the South. In 1860 only Tredegar Iron Works, a
    vast industrial enterprise in Richmond, Virginia, driven by more
    than 450 slaves and nearly as many free laborers, could produce
    bat le-ready cannon for the South. The Confederate government,
    almost from the moment of its creation, set out to spur additional
    capacity to make arms, particularly in Alabama, where a nascent
    iron and coal industry was already emerging and lit le ghting was
    likely to occur. During the war, a dozen or more new iron furnaces
    were put into blast in Alabama;12 by 1864, the state was pumping
    out four times more iron than any other southern state.
    Across Alabama, individual property holders—slaveholders
    speci cal y— were