Slavery by Another Name Read Online Free PDF

aggressively encouraged to at empt primitive
    industrial e orts to support the Confederate war e ort. The rebel
    government o ered generous inducements to entrepreneurs and
    large slave owners to devote their resources to the South's industrial
    needs. With much of the major plantation areas of Mississippi
    under constant federal harassment, thousands of slaves there were
    without work. Slave owners wil ing to transport their black workers
    to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid
    conscription into the southern armies.
    After seeing their homes and stockpiles of cot on burned, W H.
    and Lewis Thompson, brothers from Hinds County, Mississippi, and
    the owners of large numbers of slaves, moved to Bibb County
    midway through the war to mine the Cahaba coal elds for the
    Confederacy. They opened the Lower Thompson mine, and later
    another relative and his slaves arrived to dig another mine. The coal
    was hauled eleven miles to Ashby and then shipped to Selma. The
    mining was crude, using picks and hand-pul ed carts. The slaves
    drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the
    surface.13
    surface.
    A neighbor of the Cot inghams, local farmer Oliver Frost,
    regularly took his slaves to a cave on Six Mile Creek to mine
    saltpeter—a critical ingredient for gunpowder—for the Confederate
    army, often remaining there for weeks at a time. The Fancher
    family, on a farm three miles north of the crossroads community
    cal ed Six Mile, regularly hauled limestone from a quarry on their
    property to a Bibb County furnace during the war.14
    The centerpiece of the Alabama military enterprises was a
    massive and heavily forti ed arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and
    gunpowder mil located in the city of Selma. To produce its
    weapons and metal plating for use on ironclad ships critical to the
    Confederacy's limited naval operations, the Selma works relied on
    enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby
    Shelby and Bibb counties.15 Alabama iron was particularly wel
    suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying
    bat le ships with steel plates. Iron forged at Alabama's Cane Creek
    Furnace, in Calhoun County, had been utilized for a portion of the
    armor used to convert the hul of the captured USS Merrimac into
    the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862,
    bat le of ironclads.16 The Confederacy was hungry for as much of
    the material as it could get.
    Of particular strategic value were ironworks established by local
    investors in 1862 in the vil age of Brier eld. Nine miles from the
    Cot ing-ham place, the Brier eld Iron Works produced the plates
    that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during
    the bat le of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage
    of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her
    hul .17 Bibb County iron quickly became a coveted material.
    As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever
    increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brier eld
    Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or
    lease African Americans. Foundries routinely commissioned labor
    agents to prowl across the southern states in search of available
    slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the
    slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the
    Brier eld operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control
    its output. The purchase encompassed "its property of al kinds
    whatsoever," including thousands of acres of land and a catalogue of
    dozens of wagons, wheelbarrows, coal sleds, axes, and blacksmith
    tools. On the list of livestock were seventy mules, forty-one oxen,
    and nine black men: "John Anderson, aged about 35, Dennis, about
    38, George, about 30, Charles, about 47, Perry, about 40, Curry
    about 17, Mat hew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about
    30 years."18
    The Confederate government began construction of a second
    furnace at