Slavery by Another Name E-Book

Douglas A. Blackmon

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 898

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Leseprobe

“Vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude of . . . neo­slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation such practices persisted. . . . Provides insights on how we might regard the legacy of slavery, reparations, and perhaps even our justice and correctional system, with echoes for our own time.”

—The Boston Globe

“A terrific journalist and gifted writer, Blackmon is fearless in going wherever the research leads him.”

—Atlanta Magazine

“Personalizing the larger story through individual experiences, Blackmon’s book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“For those who think the conversation about race or exploitation in America is over, they should read Douglas Blackmon’s cautionary tale, Slavery by Another Name. It is at once provocative and thought-provoking, sobering and heartrending.”

—Jay Winik, author of The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800

“A powerful and eye-opening account of a crucial but unremembered chapter of American history. Blackmon’s magnificent research paints a devastating picture of the ugly and outrageous practices that kept tens of thousands of Black Americans enslaved until the onset of World War II. Slavery by Another Name is a passionate, highly impressive and hugely important book.”

—David J. Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

“Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to ‘commercial interests’ between the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.”

—Publishers Weekly

Douglas A. Blackmon is a lecturer at the University of Virginia and a contributing editor at the Washington Post. Over nearly 30 years, he has written extensively on politics, the economy, culture, the American quandary of race, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a modern society grapples with the legacy of a troubled past. Previously, he was the longtime Atlanta bureau chief and senior national correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Slavery by Another Name was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2009. The film documentary based on the book and co-produced by Blackmon was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

www.slaverybyanothername.com

Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library and Archives

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

Originally published in the USA in 2008 by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., and in 2009 by Anchor Books

ISBN: 978-184831-413-9 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-184831-486-3 (Adobe ebook format)

Text copyright © 2008, 2012 Douglas A. Blackmon

The right of Douglas A. Blackmon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Author photograph © Michael A. Schwarz Photography

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

To Michelle, Michael, and Colette

Slavery: . . . that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.

GEORGE MASON, JULY 1773

Praise

About the author

Title pages

Copyright information

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note on Language

Preface to the UK edition

Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On

PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON

I. THE WEDDING

Fruits of Freedom

II. AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

“Niggers is cheap.”

III. SLAVERY’S INCREASE

“Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak.”

IV. GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD

“The negro dies faster.”

PART TWO: HARVEST OF AN UNFINISHED WAR

V. THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

“I don’t owe you anything.”

VI. SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

“We shall have to kill a thousand . . . to get them back to their places.”

VII. THE INDICTMENTS

“I was whipped nearly every day.”

VIII. A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

“The master treated the slave unmercifully.”

IX. A RIVER OF ANGER

The South Is “an armed camp.”

X. THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

“It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes.”

XI. SLAVERY AFFIRMED

“Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers.”

XII. NEW SOUTH RISING

“This great corporation.”

PART THREE: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY

XIII. THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM

A War of Atrocities

XIV. ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

“Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes.”

XV. EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

“Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob . . . All is quiet.”

XVI. ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

“I will murder you if you don’t do that work.”

XVII. FREEDOM

“In the United States one cannot sell himself.”

EPILOGUE

The Ephemera of Catastrophe

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Periodically throughout this book, there are quotations from individuals who used offensive racial labels. I chose not to sanitize these historical statements but to present the authentic language of the period, whenever documented direct statements are available. I regret any offense or hurt caused by these crude idioms.

Preface to the UK edition

As this book’s original date of publication in the United States approached in 2008, I wondered, as every author must, what reaction would follow—or whether there would be any reaction at all. Would traditional scholars of American history renounce my implicit criticism of how the narrative of African-American life in the previous century had so often been presented? Would black readers be troubled by so explicit a compilation of the parade of forgotten horrors perpetrated against their ancestors, especially coming from a white author? Would readers say a history so painfully grotesque and recent is better left alone?

Would my audience detect the subtle parallels between the genocidal instincts of those who attempted to enslave and impoverish blacks in America in the 20th century, and those who savaged the lives of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s? Would they recognize the complicity of all white Americans—through action or ambivalent inaction—in those crimes against their black fellow citizens?

Some of my questions were quickly answered in the trickle of emails and letters that began to appear, from African-Americans with stories of their own families’ accounts of the devastating cruelty committed against them. Over the months and then years, those testimonials accumulated steadily, from dozens, then to scores, until I lost count. By now, hundreds of black readers have shared with me personal stories of lives wrecked by the almost 80-year extension of American slavery, of the heroism and defiance of men and women who stood against the force of that catastrophe for generations, of grandmothers and grandfathers who described to often disbelieving descendants their experiences living in grim de facto slavery in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

The testimony of those descendants was profound not in the additional details of the sad record that courses through this book, but much more so as a demonstration of all that was lost in the dehumanization of so many thousands of people. “How hopeful my Cottingham ancestors must have been about bright futures for their family, for their children,” said Tonya Groomes, a distant cousin of the man whose destruction is at the center of this book. “Black folks never got a chance to have the life that they should have had,” Bernard Kinsey told me. He is a distant cousin of Carrie Kinsey, whose poignant letter to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 about the kidnapping and enslavement of her 14-year-old brother touched me more than any other of the thousands of documents I found in the pursuit of this history. “They could do anything they wanted to, to these men,” Bernard said, “and guess what, they did.”

Yet the remarkable lives of Tonya, a chemist and mother who lives in suburban Atlanta, and Bernard, a retired Xerox Corp. executive who rose to extraordinary fame and financial success, demonstrate the scale of the injury done by these events to American life—and indeed to all of human society. Thousands of times, the talents, ambitions and industriousness of African-American men and women like the two of them were lost in the cruelty and abuse of the century after our civil war. I found in that full recognition an even deeper appreciation of the lives led by those who overcame all the obstacles set before them, then and now.

More unexpected than the voices of African-Americans were those of white readers who shared with me their connections to the oppressors and villains described in this book. “We did not know of any of this before,” said one email, from a great-great-granddaughter of a viciously cruel white industrialist in Atlanta named Joel Hurt. “This is quite painful . . . but I believe that the ghosts of slavery and racism and the terrorism inflicted within our own country must not be hidden away but brought out into the open. . . . Without the whole truth, we live only in illusions.”

That so many people are open to such honest examinations of the past is perhaps the most positive aspect of the response to this book. I hope that this history continues to help shatter such illusions, most importantly the persistent fantasy that the shape of the world surrounding us today—and the fortunes good or bad of individuals within it—has little relation to the events of decades ago steadily fading into obscure memory.

The answers to some of the other questions I wondered about years ago are still forming. A European audience is I believe more likely to recognize in this account the frightening form and methodology of a society bent toward the simultaneous commission of horror and the abject denial of it. It is a human narrative that is sadly neither as unique nor infrequent as we would wish were so, and one guarded against only by the relentless reexamination of terrors that have come before.

Douglas Blackmon

July 4, 2012

INTRODUCTION

The Bricks We Stand On

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1

Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being 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 state 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, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-­two-­year-­old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-­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 adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man 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 company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope 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 barrack at night 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 have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.

Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide. Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among 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. Forty-­five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling­ downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what 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 dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.

I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, 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 being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area. Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center 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 near what had been the intersection of two rail 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 iron—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height 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 work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.

A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record 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’s inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another 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. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3

Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.

The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-­mails, letters, and phone 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 be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: “I guess it’s 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 way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation’s most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society 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 still 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 large 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 be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first 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 abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however 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 under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next 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 by the most dubious sources—southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black 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 informal—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black 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 also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as 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, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only 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 county 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 delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly 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, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence 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 state and county governments, large corporations, small-­time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black 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 choice between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one 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 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down 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, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States 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 same men who built 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 employ forced African American labor in the 1870s. The South’s highly evolved system and customs of leasing slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves, and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment employed against “prisoners” in 1910 were the same as those used against “slaves” in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that suffocated the aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an explicable account of the neo-­slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of his life.

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

On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-­year-­old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no interest. “Mr. Prassident,” wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. “They wont let me have him. . . . He hase not don nothing 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 12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system’s caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time 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 birth 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 almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively 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 main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

That silence was an agonizing 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. But 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 found 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 South; 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 account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single, anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green’s most 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 benefit of his words the stifled horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended through the now-­lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that Cottenham belonged as the central figure of this narrative. The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time. I try 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 voice rests at the center of this book.

I

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, God-­fearing 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 rough-­hewn 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 1868 was the first among Cottingham people, black or white, in two seasons. Another slave, Albert, had wed, and left for good in the middle of the first picking time after the destruction of the war—amid the chaos and uncertainty when no one could be sure slavery had truly ended.7 Albert ­didn’t wait to find out.

Now, two years later, the coming marriage surely warmed Elisha at some level. But as Henry prepared to take a wife and become a man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had forged—everything on which that gift to his daughter twenty years before had been predicated—hung in the fragile limbo of a transformed social order. Whatever satisfaction the filial ties gave the white master at the wedding of his former bondsman would have been tempered by the poverty and grief that had overwhelmed him.

Most of Elisha’s slaves remained nearby. Some still worked his property, for wages or a share of the cotton crop. But the end of the war had left the white Cottinghams at a point of near desolation. The hard winter threatened to bring them to their knees.

As Henry and Mary’s wedding approached in 1868, whites across the South strained to accept the apparently inevitable ignominies descending from the war. The loss of fortunes, the war’s blood and sorrow, the humiliation of Union soldiers encamped in their towns, all these things whites had come to bear. They would bear them a little longer, at least until the instant threats of hunger and military force receded.

But these abominations paled against the specter that former slaves, with their 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 fighting, the U.S. Congress had created the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid the South’s emancipated slaves.8 New laws gave the agency the power to divide land confiscated 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 allowed 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 northern soldiers still garrisoned across the region would eventually parcel out to them all 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 rallying calls 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 confiscation of the estates, which would be given to their former bondsmen.”9

Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by Gen. William 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 flared 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 following 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 off of their forty-­acre tracts.10

Forty miles to the west of the Cottingham farm, in Greene County, hundreds of former slaves filed suit against white landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be compelled to pay wages earned during the prior season’s work. Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it all 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 fighting, Alabama industrialists realized that the market for iron sufficient 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 battle-­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 little fighting 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 specifically—were aggressively encouraged to attempt primitive industrial efforts to support the Confederate war effort. The rebel government offered 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 willing 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 cotton 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 coalfields 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-­pulled carts. The slaves drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the surface.13

A neighbor of the Cottinghams, 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 called 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 fortified arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and gunpowder mill 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 well suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying battle 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 hull of the captured USS Merrimac into the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862, battle 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 village of Brierfield. Nine miles from the Cottingham place, the Brierfield Iron Works produced the plates that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during the battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her hull.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, Brierfield 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 Brierfield operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control its output. The purchase encompassed “its property of all 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, Matthew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about 30 years.”18

The Confederate government began construction of a second furnace at the site shortly after acquiring the property. All of its output went to the Selma Arsenal, fifty miles by railroad to the south, where the iron was used for armor and for naval guns, including the state-­of-­the-­art eleven-­inch Brooke rifled cannon, with a capacity of firing a 230-­pound shell more than two thousand yards.19

By the standards of the antebellum South, the Brierfield Iron Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder. The adjacent village held church in a schoolhouse surrounded by the tenements and small housing for three hundred workers. Two massive brick blast furnaces, each forty feet high, belched a thick brew of smoke and gases at the top and a torrent of liquefied iron at the base. Nearby was a rolling mill where the molten iron was formed into crude one-­hundred-­pound “pigs” for shipment to Selma, and loaded onto a railroad line extended into the factory yard. One hundred yards away sat a kiln for firing limestone, ten tons of which was fed each day into the furnaces. Beyond the kiln was a quarry for the endless task of repairing the stone furnaces, a sawmill, and then seven thousand acres of forest from which fuel for the constantly burning fires was cut.20

The nine slaves owned by the ironworks were an anomaly. Few industrial enterprises wanted to actually purchase slaves. They were too expensive at acquisition, and too costly and difficult to maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become uncooperative, or die. Far preferable to the slave-­era industrialist was to lease the slave chattel owned by other men.

In 1864, however, few such workers could be found anymore. Instead, the Confederate officer commanding the Brierfield iron production operation, Maj. William Richardson Hunt, rented two hundred slaves to perform the grueling tasks necessary to continue equipping the rebel army.21 Late in the war, as the need for the area’s coal and iron capacity grew dire, the Confederate government began to forcibly impress the slaves held by whites in the county. A son of Rev. Starr’s—a doctor and also a resident of the Cottingham Loop—became the government’s agent for seizing slaves.22 There is no surviving record of which black men were pressed into service. But by war’s end, Scipio Cottingham, the sixty-­three-­year-­old slave who had shared the farm longest with master Elisha, had come to identify himself as a foundry man. Almost certainly, he had been among those rented to the Brierfield furnace and compelled to help arm the troops fighting to preserve his enslavement.

As the war years progressed, ever larger numbers of local men from near the Cottingham farm left for battle duty. Two of Elisha’s sons fought for the Confederacy. Moses and James, both husbands and fathers, each saw gruesome action, personal injury, and capture by the Union. Elisha’s grandson Oliver, too young to fight with the troops, joined the Home Guard, the ragtag platoons of old men and teenagers whose job was to patrol the roads for deserters, fleeing slaves, and Union scouts.

In the beginning, large crowds gathered at the stores in the crossroads settlement of Six Mile to send them off, and groups of women worked together to sew the uniforms they wore. Soldiers on the move through the area were a regular sight, crossing the Cahaba on the ferry near the mouth of Cottingham Creek, and traversing the main road from there toward the rail towns to the east.23

Confederate soldiers camped often on the Cottingham farm, stretching out in the big field near the river, foraging from the plantation’s supplies and food, exchanging spent horses for fresh ones. At one point late in the war, an entire regiment set camp in the field, erecting tents and lighting cooking fires.24

The appearance of Confederate soldiers must have been an extraordi­nary event in the lives of the black members of the Cottingham clan. The war years were a conflicted period of confused roles for slaves. They were the subjects of the Union army’s war of liberation, and the victims of the South’s economic system. Yet at the same time, slaves were also servants and protectors of their white masters. In the woods near the Cottingham home, slaves guarded the horses and possessions of their white owners, hidden there to avoid raids of northern soldiers. Some slaves took the opportunity to flee, but most stayed at their posts until true liberation came in the spring of 1865.

The foundry and arsenal at Selma and the simple mines and furnaces around the Cottingham farm that supplied it with raw materials had taken on outsized importance as the war dragged on. The Alabama manufacturing network became the backbone of the Confederacy’s ability to make arms,25 as the Tredegar factories were depleted of raw materials and skilled workers and menaced by the advancing armies of Ulysses S. Grant. Preservation of the Alabama enterprises was a key element of a last-­ditch plan by Jefferson Davis, the southern president, to retreat with whatever was left of the Confederate military into the Deep South and continue the war.26

For more than a year, Union forces in southern Tennessee and northern Alabama massed for an anticipated order to obliterate any continued capacity of a rump Confederate government to make arms. Small groups of horse soldiers made regular probing raids, against minimal southern resistance. In April of 1864, Alabama’s governor wired Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of rebel forces in Alabama and Mississippi, imploring him to send additional troops. “The enemy’s forces . . . are fortifying their position with their cavalry raiding over the country. . . . It is certain that the forces will work way South and destroy the valuable works in Central Alabama. . . . Can nothing be done?”27

Finally in March 1865, a mass of 13,500 Union cavalrymen swept down from the Tennessee border, in one of the North’s penultimate death blows to the rebellion. Commanded by Gen. James H. Wilson, the Union army, well drilled and amply armed, split into three huge raiding parties, each assigned to destroy key elements of Alabama’s industrial infrastructure. Moving unchallenged for days, the federal troops burned or wrecked iron forges, mills, and massive stockpiles of cotton and coal at Red Mountain, Irondale, and Helena, north of Bibb County. On the morning of March 30, Union soldiers slogged down the rain-­drenched roads into Columbiana, destroying the machinery of the Shelby Iron Works, shoving its equipment into local wells and streams, and freeing the slaves critical to its operations.

Against nearly hopeless odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave dealer who had become the South’s most storied horseman, met the blue advance at a point south of the town of Montevallo. Skirmishing along Mahan Creek, just miles from the Cottingham farm, Forrest’s disorganized command could only harass Wilson’s advance. Northern troops took the Brierfield furnace on March 31, and left it a ruin.

Outmanned and outfought, with flooding creeks blocking his maneuvers, Forrest, himself slashed by a saber in savage fighting on April 1, retreated for a final stand at Selma. The next day, Wilson’s troops charged the fortified industrial complex in Selma, and routed Forrest’s remaining four thousand men. The Confederate general slipped away with an escort of one hundred soldiers, massacring as he made his escape most of a contingent of twenty-­five sleeping Union scouts he stumbled upon in a field.

Federal forces captured nearly three thousand of Forrest’s men, along with more than sixty pieces of field cannon, scores of heavy artillery guns, nine factories, five major iron forges, three foundries, twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and 35,000 bales of cotton. The arsenal, factory shops, and foundries at Selma were systematically destroyed. Perhaps most shocking to local whites, before moving on to attack Georgia, Wilson’s officers quickly raised a one-­thousand-­man regiment of black troops, placed under the command of the Third Ohio Cavalry.28

With the remaining Confederate armies commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unable to unite, Jefferson Davis’s hope to continue the rebellion as a guerrilla struggle collapsed. Cut off from his remaining troops, his Alabama munitions system destroyed, deprived of the last regions of relative security in the South, he attempted to flee to Texas or Mexico. Under hot pursuit by detachments of General Wilson’s troops, he was captured by Union forces in Georgia weeks later. The war came finally to its end.